Managing Biological Information Using Biological Knowledge

The Transparent Access to Multiple Bioinformatics Information Sources (TAMBIS) system uses an ontology to give the illusion of a common query interface to multiple, diverse, heterogeneous bioinformatics resources. The knowledge in the TAMBIS ontology (TaO) allows biologists to form complex, multi-source queries without having to know which source to use, the location of the source, the meaning of terms within the source and how to transfer information between resources. The TaO can be seen to add a semantic layer over these bioinformatics resources. Ontologies are finding a wider use in the bioinformatics arena, emphasising the usefulness of knowledge in bioinformatics. Just as the vision for the Semantic Web envisages the use of knowledge to give a machine processable web, so semantic bioinformatics resources will enable machine processable, rather than only machine readable, bioinformatics resources.