Ontology Using Role Concept Recognized on Biological Relationships and Its Application

The biological ontology applied to all organisms is useful to exchange genome informatics and to compare them. On one hand, biological domain ontology for specific organism is necessary to provide controlled common vocabulary for researchers interested in the field. In the biological domain ontology, gene, gene product, and biological process should be reasonably connected for covering knowledge of molecular genetics and genome informatics. Role concept [1, 2] is suitable to represent a changeability of gene and gene product in cell. We designed a prototype of biological domain ontology using role concept and relationship. Rice Ontology (RO) has been developed as biological domain ontology. Rice is an important model plant of genome research, and various data sets such as sequence information, full-length cDNA, and microarray, have been published. RO is expected to support the overview of these informatics data and the inference of the pathway or the function.