Integration of protein data sources through PO

Abstract

Resolving heterogeneity among various protein data sources is a crucial problem if we want to gain more information about proteomics process. Information from multiple protein databases like PDB, SCOP, and UniProt need to integrated to answer user queries. Issues of Semantic Heterogeneity haven't been addressed so far in Protein Informatics. This paper outlines protein data source composition approach based on our existing work of Protein Ontology (PO). The proposed approach enables semi-automatic interoperation among heterogeneous protein data sources. The establishment of semantic interoperation over conceptual framework of PO enables us to get a better insight on how information can be integrated systematically and how queries can be composed. The semantic interoperation between protein data sources is based on semantic relationships between concepts of PO. No other such generalized semantic protein data interoperation framework has been considered so far. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.