Primer on ontologies

Abstract

As molecular biology has increasingly become a data-intensive discipline, ontologies have emerged as an essential computational tool to assist in the organisation, description and analysis of data. Ontologies describe and classify the entities of interest in a scientific domain in a computationally accessible fashion such that algorithms and tools can be developed around them. The technology that underlies ontologies has its roots in logic-based artificial intelligence, allowing for sophisticated automated inference and error detection. This chapter presents a general introduction to modern computational ontologies as they are used in biology.