CelOWS: um framework baseado em ontologias com serviços web para modelagem conceitual em biologia sistêmica

Abstract

The intensive research at biological science has generated large amounts of data. Experimental tools, methods and technologies made possible a better understanding of various functions, structures and processes related to biophysics and physiology. The increase in the computational power and the application of numerical methods lead to development and use of more complex physiological models. The need of understanding of biological systems, at systemic level, lead to recent definition of Systems Biology, that adopts a systems-driven approach to describe dynamic process inside the cells. One can consider three levels of models in Systems Biology: biological, mathematical and computational. The challenge is how to represent the details of these levels in a way that can be used to explore, at several levels, the ideas and observations. The description of a model with a higher level of abstraction is fundamental. The conceptual modeling allows an abstract data representation, closer to user world, reducing the semantic gap between the domain and its representation. This work proposes a conceptual description of biological models, using ontologies, description logics and semantic rules. A service-oriented framework named CelOWS is introduced. Its architecture is based on an ontology named CelO (Cell Component Ontology). The models, described using an ontology language, are computationally represented as web services and can be used with scientific-workflows tools to compose more complex models.