Adding Semantics to Genome Databases: Towards an Ontology for Molecular Biology

Molecular biology has a communicationproblem. There are manydatabases using their ownlabels and categories for storing data objects and someusing identical labels andcategories but with a different meaning.Conversely, one concept is often found under different names.Prominentexamples are the concepts "gene" and "protein sequence"which are used with different semanticsbymajorinternational genomicand protein databases thereby makingdatabase integration difficult andstrenuous. This situation can only be improvedby either defining individual semanticinterfaces betweeneach pair of databases 2(complexity of order n ) or by implementingone agreeable, transparent and computationallytractable semantic repository andlinking each databaseto it (complexityof order n). Ontoiogies are one meansto provide such semantic repository by explicitly specifying the meaningof and relation between the fundamental concepts in an application domain. Here.heuristics for building an ontologya...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ISMB
• Authors: Steffen Schulze-Kremer
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Computationallytractable Semantic Repository, Genomicand Protein Databases, ISMB 1997, Semantic Repository