Dataset Information

BioThings Explorer: a query engine for a federated knowledge graph of biomedical APIs.

ABSTRACT: Knowledge graphs are an increasingly common data structure for representing biomedical information. These knowledge graphs can easily represent heterogeneous types of information, and many algorithms and tools exist for querying and analyzing graphs. Biomedical knowledge graphs have been used in a variety of applications, including drug repurposing, identification of drug targets, prediction of drug side effects, and clinical decision support. Typically, knowledge graphs are constructed by centralization and integration of data from multiple disparate sources. Here, we describe BioThings Explorer, an application that can query a virtual, federated knowledge graph derived from the aggregated information in a network of biomedical web services. BioThings Explorer leverages semantically precise annotations of the inputs and outputs for each resource, and automates the chaining of web service calls to execute multi-step graph queries. Because there is no large, centralized knowledge graph to maintain, BioThing Explorer is distributed as a lightweight application that dynamically retrieves information at query time. More information can be found at https://explorer.biothings.io, and code is available at https://github.com/biothings/biothings_explorer.

SUBMITTER: Callaghan J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10153288 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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BioThings Explorer: a query engine for a federated knowledge graph of biomedical APIs.

Callaghan Jackson J Xu Colleen H CH Xin Jiwen J Cano Marco Alvarado MA Riutta Anders A Zhou Eric E Juneja Rohan R Yao Yao Y Narayan Madhumita M Hanspers Kristina K Agrawal Ayushi A Pico Alexander R AR Wu Chunlei C Su Andrew I AI

ArXiv 20230418

Knowledge graphs are an increasingly common data structure for representing biomedical information. These knowledge graphs can easily represent heterogeneous types of information, and many algorithms and tools exist for querying and analyzing graphs. Biomedical knowledge graphs have been used in a variety of applications, including drug repurposing, identification of drug targets, prediction of drug side effects, and clinical decision support. Typically, knowledge graphs are constructed by centr ...[more]

PMID: 37131885

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Project description:BackgroundKnowledge graphs support biomedical research efforts by providing contextual information for biomedical entities, constructing networks, and supporting the interpretation of high-throughput analyses. These databases are populated via manual curation, which is challenging to scale with an exponentially rising publication rate. Data programming is a paradigm that circumvents this arduous manual process by combining databases with simple rules and heuristics written as label functions, which are programs designed to annotate textual data automatically. Unfortunately, writing a useful label function requires substantial error analysis and is a nontrivial task that takes multiple days per function. This bottleneck makes populating a knowledge graph with multiple nodes and edge types practically infeasible. Thus, we sought to accelerate the label function creation process by evaluating how label functions can be re-used across multiple edge types.ResultsWe obtained entity-tagged abstracts and subsetted these entities to only contain compounds, genes, and disease mentions. We extracted sentences containing co-mentions of certain biomedical entities contained in a previously described knowledge graph, Hetionet v1. We trained a baseline model that used database-only label functions and then used a sampling approach to measure how well adding edge-specific or edge-mismatch label function combinations improved over our baseline. Next, we trained a discriminator model to detect sentences that indicated a biomedical relationship and then estimated the number of edge types that could be recalled and added to Hetionet v1. We found that adding edge-mismatch label functions rarely improved relationship extraction, while control edge-specific label functions did. There were two exceptions to this trend, Compound-binds-Gene and Gene-interacts-Gene, which both indicated physical relationships and showed signs of transferability. Across the scenarios tested, discriminative model performance strongly depends on generated annotations. Using the best discriminative model for each edge type, we recalled close to 30% of established edges within Hetionet v1.ConclusionsOur results show that this framework can incorporate novel edges into our source knowledge graph. However, results with label function transfer were mixed. Only label functions describing very similar edge types supported improved performance when transferred. We expect that the continued development of this strategy may provide essential building blocks to populating biomedical knowledge graphs with discoveries, ensuring that these resources include cutting-edge results.

Dataset Information

BioThings Explorer: a query engine for a federated knowledge graph of biomedical APIs.

Publications

BioThings Explorer: a query engine for a federated knowledge graph of biomedical APIs.

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