Abstract

Motivation: Experimental metadata are stored in many different formats and styles, creating challenges in comparison, reproduction and analysis. These difficulties impose severe limitations on the usability of such metadata in a wider context. The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), developed as part of a global, cross community effort, provides an approach to represent biological and clinical investigations in an explicit and integrative framework which facilitates computational processing and semantic web compatibility. Here we detail two real-world applications of OBI and show how OBI satisfies such use cases.

Keywords

data-integration, obi, ontologies, ontology-mapping, owl, rule-based-mediation, semantics, sqwrl, swrl