Understanding semantic links among heterogeneous biological data sources

Availability of increasingly rich biological data has tremendous potential for discovering new knowledge. This can be accomplished by traversing links among heterogeneous data sources. Current ways of implementing these links do not explicitly represent their semantics, and therefore, fail to provide useful information. In order to facilitate knowledge discovery, we believe it is important to understand the semantics of biological data entities, including biological sequences and their structures, and more importantly, the types of links among these entities. Once the links are formally defined and labeled, operators based on these semantics can be developed to aid biologists in dynamically linking these data sources, which will greatly improve the opportunities for knowledge discovery.