BioAssay Ontology (BAO): a semantic description of bioassays and high-throughput screening results

摘要: High-throughput screening (HTS) is one of the main strategies to identify novel entry points for development small molecule chemical probes and drugs now commonly accessible public sector research. Large amounts data generated in HTS campaigns are submitted repositories such as PubChem, which growing at an exponential rate. The diversity quantity available assays results pose enormous challenges organizing, standardizing, integrating, analyzing datasets thus maximize scientific ultimately health impact huge investments made implement capabilities. Novel approaches organize, standardize access required address these challenges. We developed first ontology describe experiments using expressive description logic. BioAssay Ontology (BAO) serves a foundation standardization semantic knowledge model. In this paper we show important examples formalizing domain point out advantages approach. online NCBO bioportal http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/44531 . After large manual curation effort, loaded BAO-mapped triples into RDF database store used reasoner several case studies demonstrate benefits formalized representation BAO. illustrate querying capabilities where BAO enables retrieval inferred search that relevant given query, but not explicitly defined. opens new functionality annotating, querying, potential discovering by means inference.