Building an Ontology for the Domain of Plant Science using Protégé
This addresses data integration and knowledge representation problems for plant science researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing ontology-building methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of managing heterogeneous biological data in Plant Science by building an ontology for Arabidopsis Thaliana to provide a conceptual model with concepts and relationships as a reference for botany and other plant sciences.
Due to the rapid development of technology, large amounts of heterogeneous data generated every day. Biological data is also growing in terms of the quantity and quality of data considerably. Despite the attempts for building a uniform platform to handle data management in Plant Science, researchers are facing the challenge of not only accessing and integrating data stored in heterogeneous data sources but also representing the implicit and explicit domain knowledge based on the available plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide a framework for describing the structures and vocabularies to support the semantics of information and facilitate automated reasoning and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we focus on building an ontology for Arabidopsis Thaliana in Plant Science domain. The aim of this study is to provide a conceptual model of Arabidopsis Thaliana as a reference plant for botany and other plant sciences, including concepts and their relationships.