Building and Querying Microbial Ontology

The microbial taxonomy is based on the characteristics of microorganisms that can be objectively observed and measured. There are many scheme of microbial classification, but the latest is the three domain system and is the most accepted. Ontologies are the new form of knowledge representation that acts in synergy with agents and Semantic Web Architecture. Ontologies define domain concepts and the relationships between them, and thus provide a domain language that is meaningful to both humans and machines. The relationships in Ontology are explicitly named and developed with specification of rules and constraints so that they reflect the context of domain for which the knowledge is modelled. Ontologies can be built by using various GUI based software tools, known as Ontology editors. Among all editors Protégé is widely supported by a huge research community. For effective use of Ontology, protégé provides a query interface known as SPARQL query panel. SPARQL is a syntactically-SQL-like language for querying RDF graphs. Microbial Taxonomy Ontology is developed for the three domain system of microbes for the domain Bacteria which will be helpful for the study of Agriculturally Important Microbes (Bacteria). This ontology is built in the Protégé OWL editor from Domain to Genus level. Using this ontology, a query interface can be developed that will help detailed study of microbial taxonomy, classification of microbes as well as exchange knowledge between software agents and systems. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the University of Kalyani, Department of Computer Science & Engineering.