A Conceptual Modeling Approach To Improve Human Genome Understanding

Abstract

Information systems cannot be designed nor programmed without prior elicitation of the knowledge they need to know. Representing this knowledge in an explicit form is the main application of a conceptualmodel. By allowing for a minor paradigm shift, one can imagine the human body as an information system; highly complex and built of biological molecules, rather than man-made hardware, but an information system nonetheless. It is this paradigm shift that allows for exciting possibilities. Just as acquiring the source-code of a man-made system allows for post-production modifications and easy software maintenance, the same could very well apply to the human body: essentially, the act of debugging life itself. Acquiring the source-code to the human information system begins with the first step in any information system development: the creation of a comprehensive, correct conceptual model of the human genome.