A proposal for a gene functions wiki
Abstract
Large knowledge bases integrating dierent domains canprovide a foundation for new applications in biology such as data miningor automated reasoning. The traditional approach to the constructionof such knowledge bases is manual and therefore extremely time consuming.The ubiquity of the internet now makes large-scale communitycollaboration for the construction of knowledge bases, such as the successfulonline encyclopedia "Wikipedia", possible. We propose an extension of this model to the collaborative annotationof molecular data. We argue that a semantic wiki provides the functionalityrequired for this project since this can capitalize on the existingrepresentations in biological ontologies. We discuss the use of a differentrelationship model than the one provided by RDF and OWL torepresent the semantic data. We argue that this leads to a more intuitiveand correct way to enter semantic content in the wiki. Furthermore, weshow how formal ontologies could be used to increase the usability ofthe software through type-checking and automatic reasoning.