Proposal of an Ontology including Unknown Factors in Programed Cell Death

Abstract

Computational simulations are expected to play an important role in understanding of unknown factors in biological phenomena. Thus, knowledge in biological phenomena is accumulated as qualitative descriptions in natural languages on literature. Construction of ontologies is adapted to translate such literature knowledge into knowledge representation available for computers. Simulations are indispensable in revealing new factors in a phenomenon which haven't been empirically observed yet. Ontologies enable such simulations to verify new factors assumed to be. In this study, we constructed a device ontology in the domain of one type of cell deaths called apoptosis. We proposed an approach to identify relationships among functions according to the device ontology.