Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Towards Bioinformatics Resourceomes
Nicola Cannata, Flavio Corradini, Emanuela Merelli,
Francesca Piersigilli, and Leonardo Vito
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università di Camerino,
Via Madonna delle Carceri 9, 62032 Camerino (MC), Italy
name.surname@unicam.it
In science fiction, human beings have been depicted able to colonize planets
of far stars exploiting their chemical and mining resources. We can image
bioinformatics as a very dynamic universe, continuously growing under our
eyes. More and more scientists are approaching it and would like to easier
explore it, discovering the resources that can be found in every space region
(i.e. related to every bioinformatics topic). We propose to intuitively organize
into Resourceomes the hierarchical vision of a scientific domain perceived by
its scientists, connecting the related resources to the topics they concern.
A Resourceome can be seen as a map of a scientific “universe”. A semantic
browser for Resourceomes permits to intuitively navigate in the domain,
eventually zooming it in and out. Once discovered a resource of interest it is
possible to be “tele-ported” to it. More importantly, the maps are “machine
understandable”, being built on ontologies and published on the Web with
Semantic Web technologies.
1 Bioinformatics Resources
We introduce the reader to the universe of bioinformatics, concentrating our
attention on bioinformatics resources, like e.g. databases, articles and programs.
1.1 A Universe in Expansion
Bioinformatics can be seen as a very dynamic and turbulent universe in continuous
expansion. Its expansion speed is increasing and new regions are suddenly
created. Bursts of new topics [44] can be often observed as well as the
deadening of other ones. Buzzwords quickly enter the scene [40]. Metaphors
are frequently used in teaching and research as well as in divulgation of science.
One of the most famous metaphors in life science paints the genome as
the “book of life” [51].
Bioinformatics originates from the encounter of the two universes of computer
science and life sciences. The growing amount of knowledge acquired
A.S. Sidhu et al. (Eds.): Biomedical Data and Applications, SCI 224, pp. 13–36.
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