Briefings in Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on May 19, 2009
Briefings in Bioinformatics 2009 10(4):392-407; doi:10.1093/bib/bbp024
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This article appears in the following Briefings in Bioinformatics issue: Special Issue: Challenges in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology [View the issue table of contents]
Biological knowledge management: the emerging role of the Semantic Web technologies
Corresponding author. Martin Kuiper. Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Høgskoleringen 5, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. Tel: +47 73550348; Fax: +47 73596100; E-mail: martin.kuiper{at}bio.ntnu.no
New knowledge is produced at a continuously increasing speed, and the list of papers, databases and other knowledge sources that a researcher in the life sciences needs to cope with is actually turning into a problem rather than an asset. The adequate management of knowledge is therefore becoming fundamentally important for life scientists, especially if they work with approaches that thoroughly depend on knowledge integration, such as systems biology. Several initiatives to organize biological knowledge sources into a readily exploitable resourceome are presently being carried out. Ontologies and Semantic Web technologies revolutionize these efforts. Here, we review the benefits, trends, current possibilities, and the potential this holds for the biosciences.
Keywords: knowledge management, system biology, Semantic Web, ontology, data integration, knowledge representation
Submitted: January 5, 2009. Received (in revised form): April 17, 2009.