Author(s)

A. S. Sidhu, T. S. Dillon & E. Chang

Abstract

Protein Ontology (PO) provides integration of heterogeneous protein and biological data sources. PO converts the enormous amounts of data collected by geneticists and molecular biologists into information that scientists, physicians and other health care professionals and researchers can use to easily understand the mapping of relationships inside protein molecules, interactions between two protein molecules and interactions between protein and other macromolecules at cellular level. This paper discusses the updates that happened to the Protein Ontology Project since it was last presented at the Data Mining 2006 Conference. Keywords: Protein Ontology, proteomics, bioinformatics, protein informatics, computational proteomics, protein structure, biomedical ontologies, data integration, data semantics. 1 Introduction The process of development of a protein annotation based on our protein ontology requires an important effort to organize, standardize and rationalize protein data and concepts. First of all, protein information must be defined and organized in a systematic manner in databases. In this context, PO addresses the following problems of existing protein databases: redundancy, data quality (errors, incorrect annotations, and inconsistencies), lack of standardization in nomenclature etc. The process of annotation relies heavily on integration of heterogeneous protein data. Integration is thus a key concept if one wants to make full use of protein data from collections. In order to be able to integrate various protein data it is important that community agree upon concepts underlying the data. PO provides a framework of structured vocabularies and standardized description of protein concepts that helps to achieve this agreement and achieve uniformity in protein data representation [1–4].

Keywords

Protein Ontology, proteomics, bioinformatics, protein informatics, computational proteomics, protein structure, biomedical ontologies, data integration, data semantics.