Towards the Generation of a Species-Independent Conceptual Schema of the Genome

Abstract

Understanding the genome, with all of its components and intrinsic relationships, is a great challenge. Conceptual modeling techniques have been used as a means to face this challenge, leading to the generation of conceptual schemes whose intent is to provide a precise ontological characterization of the components involved in biological processes. However, the heterogeneity and idiosyncrasy of genomic use cases mean that, although the genome and its internal processes remain the same among eukaryote species, conceptual modeling techniques are used to generate conceptual schemes that focus on particular scenarios (i.e., they are species-specific conceptual schemes). We claim that instead of having different, species-specific conceptual schemes, it is feasible to provide a holistic conceptual schema valid to work with every eukaryote species by generating conceptual views that are inferred from that global conceptual schema. We report our preliminary work towards the possibility of generating such a conceptual schema by ontologically comparing two existing, species-specific conceptual schemes. Those changes that are necessary to provide an expanded conceptual schema that is suitable for both use cases are identified and discussed.