YeastHub: a semantic web use case for integrating data in the life sciences domain.
BACKGROUND
As the semantic web technology is maturing and the need for life sciences data integration over the web is growing, it is important to explore how data integration needs can be addressed by the semantic web. The main problem that we face in data integration is a lack of widely-accepted standards for expressing the syntax and semantics of the data. We address this problem by exploring the use of semantic web technologies-including resource description framework (RDF), RDF site summary (RSS), relational-database-to-RDF mapping (D2RQ) and native RDF data repository-to represent, store and query both metadata and data across life sciences datasets.


RESULTS
As many biological datasets are presently available in tabular format, we introduce an RDF structure into which they can be converted. Also, we develop a prototype web-based application called YeastHub that demonstrates how a life sciences data warehouse can be built using a native RDF data store (Sesame). This data warehouse allows integration of different types of yeast genome data provided by different resources in different formats including the tabular and RDF formats. Once the data are loaded into the data warehouse, RDF-based queries can be formulated to retrieve and query the data in an integrated fashion.


BACKGROUND
The YeastHub website is accessible via the following URL: http://yeasthub.gersteinlab.org.
Cheung
Kei-Hoi
KH
Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University New Haven, CT 06520, USA. kei.cheung@yale.edu
Yip
Kevin Y
KY
Smith
Andrew
A
Deknikker
Remko
R
Masiar
Andy
A
Gerstein
Mark
M
D001695:Biology / Q000379:methods*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D019992:Databases as Topic; D030562:Databases, Protein; D005656:Fungal Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D007256:Information Systems; D020407:Internet; D011381:Programming Languages; D012984:Software; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface
D005656:Fungal Proteins