The multiple roles of ontologies in the biomediator data integration system

BioMediator is a data integration system that provides a common interface to multiple Intemet-accessible databases containing information about genetics and molecular biology. Ontologies play several important roles in the BioMediator system: First, ontologies of genetics and molecular biology can serve as data sources. In this role concepts from the ontologies are returned as results of queries. Second, queries are posed against a mediated schema, which is an ontology describing the domain of discourse. User queries are expressed using the concepts in the mediated schema to indicate which results to retrieve. Third, each data source is an instance of the system ontology. This ontology describes information about the data sources including how often the source is updated and by whom. Finally, we are exploring the use of ontologies as a mechanism for mapping data sources to the mediated schema, This will facilitate extending BioMediator from a centralized integration platform to a distributed network of peers.