Complex Query Formulation Over Diverse Information Sources Using an Ontology

Biologists increasingly need to ask complex questions over the large quantity of data and analysis tools that now exist. To do this, the individual sources need to be made to work together. The knowledge needed to accomplish this places a barrier between the bench biologist and the question he or she wishes to ask. The TAMBIS project (Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources) has sought to remove these barriers – thereby making the process of asking questions against multiple sources transparent. Central to the TAMBIS system is an ontology of biological terms. This allows TAMBIS to be used to formulate rich, complex queries over multiple sources. The ontology is constructed in a manner that ensures only biologically meaningful queries can be posed. TAMBIS then uses the ontology to transform the declarative, source-independent query into an optimised, ordered sequence of source dependent requests, that is then executed against the individual sources.