COWB: A cloud-based framework supporting collaborative knowledge management within biomedical communities

•COWB is a framework for collaborative knowledge management in biomedicine.•Knowledge is represented by a semantic network interactively created by users.•A novel approach using GAE cloud platform for developing and running COWB.•Detailed explanation of user interaction modes.•The implementation proves the potential of web applications running on cloud.

Despite the large acceptance of Semantic Web technologies and their key role in bioinformatics, some concerns begin to emerge about their suitability for supporting the requirements of collaborative environments where a research community shares and creates new knowledge. The paper discusses these concerns and proposes COWB (COllaborative Workspaces in Biomedicine), a framework which supports collaborative knowledge management in the context of biomedical communities. COWB is grounded on a multi-layer ontology-centric model. It harnesses both the semantic knowledge captured from ontologies and the functional knowledge about resources which extend the domain knowledge and support its management. Public and private workspaces provide an accessible representation of the collective knowledge that is incrementally created and allow the knowledge to cross the boundaries of closed local information. The paper presents the deployment of COWB in a cloud platform which severely curtails issues associated with scalability and performance. The paper shows the suitability of the proposed approach and aims to suggest how exploiting the potential of the Semantic Web technologies in the context of emergent technologies including Web 2.0, NoSQL databases and the cloud paradigm.