Facilitating the development of controlled vocabularies for metabolomics technologies with text mining

Background: Many bioinformatics applications rely on controlled vocabularies or ontologies to consistently interpret and seamlessly integrate information scattered across public resources. Experimental data sets from metabolomics studies need to be integrated with one another, but also with data produced by other types of omics studies in the spirit of systems biology, hence the pressing need for vocabularies and ontologies in metabolomics. However, it is time-consuming and non trivial to construct these resources manually. Results: We describe a methodology for rapid development of controlled vocabularies, a study originally motivated by the needs for vocabularies describing metabolomics technologies. We present case studies involving two controlled vocabularies (for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and gas chromatography) whose development is currently underway as part of the Metabolomics Standards Initiative. The initial vocabularies were compiled manually, providing a total...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Irena Spasic, Daniel Schober, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann, Douglas B. Kell, Norman W. Paton
• Keywords: BMCBI 2008, Controlled Vocabularies, Initial Vocabularies, Metabolomics