Understanding and using the meaning of statements in a bio-ontology: recasting the Gene Ontology in OWL.

ABSTRACT: The bio-ontology community falls into two camps: first we have biology domain experts, who actually hold the knowledge we wish to capture in ontologies; second, we have ontology specialists, who hold knowledge about techniques and best practice on ontology development. In the bio-ontology domain, these two camps have often come into conflict, especially where pragmatism comes into conflict with perceived best practice. One of these areas is the insistence of computer scientists on a well-defined semantic basis for the Knowledge Representation language being used. In this article, we will first describe why this community is so insistent. Second, we will illustrate this by examining the semantics of the Web Ontology Language and the semantics placed on the Directed Acyclic Graph as used by

SUBMITTER: Aranguren ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1819394 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature