Abstract
BackgroundThe motivation for the BioHub project is to create an Integrated Knowledge Management System (IKMS) that will enable chemists to source ingredients from bio-renewables, rather than from non-sustainable sources such as fossil oil and its derivatives.MethodThe BioHubKB is the data repository of the IKMS; it employs Semantic Web technologies, especially OWL, to host data about chemical transformations, bio-renewable feedstocks, co-product streams and their chemical components. Access to this knowledge base is provided to other modules within the IKMS through a set of RESTful web services, driven by SPARQL queries to a Sesame back-end. The BioHubKB re-uses several bio-ontologies and bespoke extensions, primarily for chemical feedstocks and products, to form its knowledge organisation schema.ResultsParts of plants form feedstocks, while various processes generate co-product streams that contain certain chemicals. Both chemicals and transformations are associated with certain qualities, which the BioHubKB also attempts to capture. Of immediate commercial and industrial importance is to estimate the cost of particular sets of chemical transformations (leading to candidate surfactants) performed in sequence, and these costs too are captured. Data are sourced from companies’ internal knowledge and document stores, and from the publicly available literature. Both text analytics and manual curation play their part in populating the ontology. We describe the prototype IKMS, the BioHubKB and the services that it supports for the IKMS.AvailabilityThe BioHubKB can be found via http://biohub.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ontology/biohub-kb.owl.
Highlights
The motivation for the BioHub project is to create an Integrated Knowledge Management System (IKMS) that will enable chemists to source ingredients from bio-renewables, rather than from non-sustainable sources such as fossil oil and its derivatives
We describe the prototype IKMS, the BioHubKB and the services that it supports for the IKMS
An important component of the IKMS is the BioHub Knowledge Base (BioHubKB) which is an RDF store that uses an ontology written in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) [1] as a schema to organise knowledge about biorenewables; their component chemicals will be used by the IKMS to seed the exploration of possible chemical ingredients through application of cheminformatics algorithms [2]
Summary
The motivation for the BioHub project is to create an Integrated Knowledge Management System (IKMS) that will enable chemists to source ingredients from bio-renewables, rather than from non-sustainable sources such as fossil oil and its derivatives. The aim of the BioHub project is to develop an Integrated Knowledge Management System (IKMS) that will enable chemists to source ingredients for chemical engineering processes from biorenewables rather than sourcing from non-renewable fossil feedstocks. The impetus of the BioHub project is to build an informatics infrastructure to support the development of surfactants and other chemicals, from sustainable agricultural feedstocks and co-product streams. The use of such agricultural streams as chemical feedstocks is intended to obviate the need for sourcing chemicals from non-renewable fossil feedstocks, and to avoid the concomitant environmental costs associated with their extraction, refinement and use. The process of exploring the sourcing of ingredients from biorenewables among the project partners is currently ad hoc, relying on reading public literature and proprietory documentation on
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call