BOWiki - a collaborative annotation and ontology curation framework

Abstract

As the amount of data being generated in biology has increased, a major challenge has been how to store and represent this data in a way that makes it easily accessible to researchers from diverse domains. Understanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype is a major focus of biological research. Various approaches to providing the link between genes and their functions have been undertaken – most require significant and dedicated manual curation. Advances in web technologies make possible an alternative route for the construction of such knowledge bases - largescale community collaboration. We describe here a system, the BOWiki, for the collaborative annotation of gene information. We argue that a semantic wiki provides the functionality required for this project since this can capitalize on the existing representations in biological ontologies. We describe our implementation and show how formal ontologies could be used to increase the usability of the software through type-checking and automatic reasoning.