A Cross-Format Framework for Consistent Information Integration among Molecular Pathways and Ontologies

The information coming from biomedical ontologies and runnable pathways is expanding continuously: research communities keep this process up and their advances are generally shared by means of dedicated resources published on the web. Having different objectives and different abstraction levels, most of these resources “speak” different languages. Employing an extensible collection of interpreters, we propose a system that abstracts the information from different resources and combines them together into a common meta-format. Preserving the resource independence, we provide an alignment service that can be used for multiple purposes. Two recent examples are: 1) The new web application Cytosolve uses an embedded version of this system to provide congruous parallel simulation of multiple models; 2) Using the BioModels.net database, a searchable dictionary of equivalent molecular reaction paths was built. Finally, the enriched knowledge can be exported in OWL and queried by semantically-enabled tools such as Protege. In this approach, we see a valuable tool to integrate and test information originating from different sources, while preserving the independence of the model curation process.