| Abstract: |
Molecular biology has a communication problem.
There are many databases using their own labels and categories for storing
data objects and some using identical labels and categories but with a different
meaning. A prominent example is the concept "gene" which is used with different
semantics by major international genomic databases. Ontologies are one means
to provide a semantic repository that can be used to systematically order
relevant concepts in molecular biology and to bridge the different notions
in various databases by explicitly specifying the meaning of and relation
between the fundamental concepts in an application domain. Here, the upper
level and a database branch of a prospective ontology for molecular biology
is presented and compared to other ontologies with respect to suitability
for molecular biology. |
