Ontological informatics infrastructure for pharmaceutical product development and manufacturing

Informatics infrastructure plays a crucial role in supporting different decision making activities related to pharmaceutical product development, ilot plant and commercial scale manufacturing by streamlining information gathering, data integration, model development and managing all hese for easy and timely access and reuse. The foundation of such an infrastructure is the explicitly and formally modeled information. This oundation enables knowledge in different forms, and best manufacturing practices, to be modeled and captured into tools to support the product ifecycle management. This paper discusses the development of ontologies, Semantic Web infrastructure and Web related technologies that make uch an infrastructure development possible. While many of the issues addressed in this paper are applicable to a wide spectrum of molecular-based roducts, we focus our work on the development of pharmaceutical informatics to support Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) as well as drug roduct development as case studies to illustrate the various aspects of this infrastructure. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.