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The Physiome Project comprises a worldwide effort to provide a computational framework for understanding human and other eukaryotic physiology. The aim is to develop integrative models at all levels of biological organization from genes to the whole organism. This is achieved via gene regulatory networks, protein pathways, integrative cell function, and tissue and whole organ structure/function relations. A key hallmark of the Physiome is that it covers many physical scales of description, from molecule-molecule interactions to whole cell behaviour to whole organ descriptions. This talk will stress the computational and semantic layers of the Physiome, the mathematical and logical "glue" that allows the various physiological scales to communicate and work with one another. The first knowledge domain is Ontologies. Ontology is a specific expression of known facts about the real world. Work on ontologies is being undertaken in order to organize biological data and knowledge at the different levels of the biological continuum. An additional and important component of this work is to facilitate easy and effective access to a range of databases, and to facilitate automated reasoning that can simultaneously extract information from many databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]