Mediation of heterogeneous information resources in the gene expression regulation domain (original) (raw)

Towards an integrated knowledge system for capturing gene expression events

Transcriptional regulation of gene expression is an important mechanism in many biological processes. Aberrations in this mechanism have been implicated in cancer and other diseases. Effective investigation of gene expression mechanisms requires a system-wide integration and assessment of all available knowledge of the underlying molecular networks. This calls for a method that effectively manages and integrates the available data. We have built a semantic web based knowledge system that constitutes a significant step in this direction: the Gene Expression Knowledge Base (GeXKB). The GeXKB encompasses three application on-tologies: the Gene Expression Ontology (GeXO), the Regulation of Gene Expression Ontology (ReXO), and the Regulation of Transcription Ontology (ReTO). These three ontologies, respec-tively, integrate gene expression information that is increasingly more specific, yet decreasing in coverage, from a variety of sources. The system is capable of answering complex biolo...