title: An ontology for bioinformatics applications.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  An ontology of biological terminology provides a model of biological concepts that can be used to form a semantic framework for many data storage, retrieval and analysis tasks. Such a semantic framework could be used to underpin a range of important bioinformatics tasks, such as the querying of heterogeneous bioinformatics sources or the systematic annotation of experimental results.
  
  
  RESULTS
  This paper provides an overview of an ontology [the Transparent Access to Multiple Biological Information Sources (TAMBIS) ontology or TaO] that describes a wide range of bioinformatics concepts. The present paper describes the mechanisms used for delivering the ontology and discusses the ontology's design and organization, which are crucial for maintaining the coherence of a large collection of concepts and their relationships.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  The TAMBIS system, which uses a subset of the TaO described here, is accessible over the Web via http://img.cs.man.ac.uk/tambis (although in the first instance, we will use a password mechanism to limit the load on our server). The complete model is also available on the Web at the above URL.
authors.affiliation: School of Biological Sciences and Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PT, UK. tambis@cs.man.ac.uk
authors.forename: P G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Goble
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bechhofer
authors.forename: N W
authors.initials: NW
authors.lastname: Paton
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stevens
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Brass
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002965:Classification; D019295:Computational Biology; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005103:Expert Systems; D008954:Models, Biological