A Semantic Map to select Structural Bioinformatics services

Structural Bioinformatics covers the prediction and analysis in-silico of biological molecular structures with the goal to understanding functional mechanisms at a molecular level. Due to the significant effort of the scientific community, this field has dramatically evolved over the recent years, in particular for proteins. The techniques available to predict and analyze protein structures are continuously improving both in their focus and their performances while new algorithms are developed. In such a context, the scientists face the increasing difficulty of identifying and accessing existing tools and understanding how the results should be interpreted and contribute to scientific discovery. BioNavigation is a path-based system that guides scientists facing difficulties to identifying resources suitable to express their scientific protocols. It exploits a description of bioinformatics resources, including applications and data repositories, organized with respect to their scientific aim in an semantic map. Scientists express their scientific protocols in terms of scientific concepts and relationships selected from an ontology, the system returns the succession of scientific resources suitable to express their protocols. In this paper, we present a semantic map of services for structural bioinformatics, applied to proteins including: (a) A semantic description of each service that captures an abstraction of the service rather than a low level syntactic description. This description is expressed in terms of an ontology of the services, linking items of the structural bioinformatics concepts ontology; (b) Service identification, detailing for each their purpose, the type of the data on which they are effective, and the type of result they provide; and (c) Exploration of available services, navigating through the graph composed of the possible interconnections between the services. The semantic map for structural bioinformatics services and its consultation of resources via BioNavigation is made available freely at http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/SemanticMap/.