Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Towards Bioinformatics Resourceomes 25
the resource ontology represents the kind of resources existing in the universe
of bioinformatics (or in other scientific domains), such as papers,
persons, programs, data. From one resource instance it is possible to
reach other instances through the semantic relationships defined in the
ontology;
the domain ontology represents the semantic relationships between the
concepts of the domain. For example in the domain could find place the
different functions performed by a set of programs;
the concerns relation allows to connect the two ontologies; in particular
through this relation, a resource can be connected to the domain topics
which it refers to.
Fig. 3. Visualization of a Resourceome: on the left the resource ontology and on
the right the domain ontology with resources related to the concepts of the domain
As an example, the paper Knowledge guided analysis of microarray data
[26], can be represented in a Resourceome by the instantiation of the concept
Paper in the resource ontology. Reading the paper an agent - human or
software - can then state that it is about “GO clustering”, so an instance of
the concerns relation can bind its instance with (the instance of) the topic
Gene Ontology guided clustering of the domain ontology. The latter could be
a child of the concept Biological knowledge guided clustering, inturnchildof
another concept, and so on.
A Resource Ontology
It is not easy to build a universally accepted classification schema for bioinformatics
resources, as the assignment of semantics to the concepts of actor
and artifact is not a trivial task. A shared ontology is needed to properly annotate
resources and for this reason here we give an example of how this task