The Development of a Cardiological Ontology to Describe Medical, Genetic and Pharmaceutical Entities and Interplay

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases remain the predominant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. As the biomedical data are rapidly accumulated in the web, the retrieval of information by the specialists becomes challenging. The Semantic web represent the solution, through the transformation of existing data with ontologies that describe their concepts in explicit detail, into machine-readable, understandable and logical processable multifunctional metadata. Herein, using bibliographic reasoning, we present a cardiological ontology in the form of N-triples that facilitates the interplay between three scientific subdomains: (i) clinical, including anatomy, physiology and pathology; (ii) basic biological, including genes, proteins and biochemical pathways; and (iii) therapeutical cardiology, including surgical and pharmacological interventions. This Semantic research approach is anticipated to produce integrated answers into complex cardiovascular biology problems such as disease risks and genotype, combinatory therapeutics and genotype, translational and personalized medicine, while it may serve as a road map for similar applications in other scientific domains.