The Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (SIO) for biomedical research and knowledge discovery

TLDR

The Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (SIO) is an ontology designed to facilitate biomedical knowledge discovery by providing a simple upper level of essential types and relations for describing arbitrary objects, processes, and attributes. SIO was developed to serve as an ontological foundation for the Bio2RDF linked data project and to enable semantic integration and discovery in SADI-based semantic web services. SIO defines simple design patterns for qualities, capabilities, functions, quantities, and informational entities, extends these patterns to chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics, and is freely available under a Creative Commons BY license. SIO has been adopted as the ontological basis for Bio2RDF and facilitates semantic integration and discovery in SADI services. Further information is available at http://sio.semanticscience.org.

Abstract

The Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (SIO) is an ontology to facilitate biomedical knowledge discovery. SIO features a simple upper level comprised of essential types and relations for the rich description of arbitrary (real, hypothesized, virtual, fictional) objects, processes and their attributes. SIO specifies simple design patterns to describe and associate qualities, capabilities, functions, quantities, and informational entities including textual, geometrical, and mathematical entities, and provides specific extensions in the domains of chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and bioinformatics. SIO provides an ontological foundation for the Bio2RDF linked data for the life sciences project and is used for semantic integration and discovery for SADI-based semantic web services. SIO is freely available to all users under a creative commons by attribution license. See website for further information: http://sio.semanticscience.org.