Understanding the Semantic Links among Heterogeneous Biological Data Sources

Abstract

Availability of increasingly rich biological data has tremendous potential for discovering new knowledge that is mostly found via the links among data sources. The current simple ways of implementing these links do not explicitly represent their semantics, and therefore, fail to provide useful information. In order to facilitate knowledge discovery, we believe it is important to understand the semantics of biological data entities, including biological sequences and their structures, and more importantly, the types of links among these entities. With the links formally defined and labeled, operators based on these semantics can then be developed to aid the biologist in dynamically linking the data sources, which will greatly improve the opportunities for knowledge discovery.