Ontology-Driven Method for Integrating Biomedical Repositories

Handling the increasing number of biological repositories and the growing amount of information they contain is a significant challenge for researchers. Thus, Semantic Web Technologies are the basis of the new approaches that are dealing with such challenges. In this paper, we describe a methodology to manage the integration of biomedical repositories into a knowledge base. This method is based on the explicit definition of the mappings between relational resources and the domain ontology and the conditions that determine the identity of a particular instance. We will describe both the method and its application to the OGO system which integrates orthologous genes and genetic diseases repositories into an ontological knowledge base.