
Scientists and
bioinformaticians alike are provided an incredibly rich variety of
resources to retrieve, analyze, transform, integrate, and visualize
scientific data. While this opulence should benefit scientific discovery
by allowing the selection of the most suitable technology to implement
digital scientific protocols, users experience difficulty identifying
what the most suitable resources are, locating the resources, and
integrating them into an efficient protocol executable.
The aim of the Semantic Maps project is to
facilitate the identification and location of bioinformatics resources.
The approach exploits a domain ontology to
classify resources with respect to their scientific meaning. Each data
source (e.g., database) is mapped to the concepts it corresponds to
(e.g., GenBank is mapped to Biological
Sequence) whereas each application or tool is mapped to the conceptual
relationship it corresponds to (e.g., BLAST is mapped to Similar_to).

The first version of the Semantic Maps was the BioNavigation system designed and
developed with Louiqa Raschid and Maria Esther Vidal, our collaborators at the
University
of
Maryland
, and by Kaushal Parekh to complete
his Professional Master Program in Computational Biosciences at
Arizona
State
University
.
The second version of the Semantic Maps was developed by Hervé Ménager, Institut Pasteur, Paris, in collaboration with Pierre Tufféry, Equipe de Bioinformatique Génomique et Moléculaire,
INSERM U726, Université Denis Diderot (
Paris
7ème).
It benefits from BioNavigation and ZWTM developed by Emmanuel Pietriga at INRIA, France. It was used to support the Semantic Map for Structural
Bioinformatics.
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We are now exploring how to develop a Semantic Map for BioMoby services thanks to a supplement grant by the
National Science Foundation. Maliha Aziz is working on this extension to complete her
Professional Master Program in Computational Biosciences at
Arizona
State
University
.
