Title: Ontology-based resources for bioinformatics analysis

Authors: Federica Viti; Ivan Merelli; Andrea Calabria; Paolo Cozzi; Ettore Mosca; Roberta Alfieri; Luciano Milanesi

Addresses: Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, Segrate, 20100, Milan, Italy. ' Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, Segrate, 20100, Milan, Italy. ' Department of Medicine, Surgery and Dentistry, Fondazione Filarete, University of Milan, 20100, Milan, Italy. ' Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, 20090, Segrate (Mi), Italy. ' Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, 20090, Segrate (Mi), Italy. ' Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, 20090, Segrate (Mi), Italy. ' Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council, 20090, Segrate (Mi), Italy

Abstract: A number of specific web accessible databases are developed in order to shed light into biomolecular data, providing novel perspectives about particular scientific problems or presenting innovative data integration approaches. Ontologies constitute an important enhancement, since they allow a better representation of biological data, by providing a hierarchical structure to organise information, enabling more effective queries, statistical analysis and semantic web searching. Here we present our experience in exploiting ontologies to enrich biomolecular databases in diverse biomolecular contexts. The semantic layer improves data organisation, accessibility and analysis and represents an invaluable support to identify relations among biological components.

Keywords: biomolecular ontologies; bioinformatics resources; web databases; semantic web; data accessibility; data analysis; data organisation; web search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2011.042488

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2011 Vol.6 No.1, pp.35 - 45

Received: 28 Apr 2010
Accepted: 11 Sep 2010

Published online: 12 Feb 2015 *

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