Migrating from the Informal to Formal bio-Ontology: Costs and Benefits
Rovert Stevens
(University of Manchester)
Ontologies are becoming increasingly widespread in bioinformatics,
especially for the annotation of data. There is often a tension between
computer scientists and biologists in this field, exemplified by the statements
"just do it properly" and "just get it done".
At the heart of this difference lies the goals of creating a shared understanding
for humans in a complex domain and creating an "understanding" of the symbols
in a domain that will enhance computational analysis of data.
In this talk, I will describe why computer scientists are so fond of language
with well-defined semantics and how to migrate towards ontology representations
with strict semantics such as OWL. At each stage of imgration there are benefits,
but also costs. Finally, I will demonstrate the benefits of strict semantics
with an example of using an OWL ontology, together with computational reasoning,
that has high-lighted potentially new proteins.