Guest Editorial for Special Section on Semantic-Based Approaches for Analysis of Biological Data

Abstract

The papers in this special section present recent developments in semantic-based approaches for biological data analysis. The systematic integration of biological data with biological knowledge is a recent trend in bioinformatics. Current biological information is spread among multiple sources and encoded in different ontologies. Biological information is associated to biological concepts in a process known as annotation. The annotation of biological data with this additional information enable the use (and the development) of algorithms that use biological ontologies as a framework to mine annotated data based on the use of semantics. The use of such annotations for the analysis of protein data is a relatively novel research area that is becoming more and more important in the field. Indeed, as shown in literature, there is a positive trend in the use of biological information in the analysis of protein data.