Semantics-oriented data science and computational life sciences: Innovative application of semantic technologies in microRNA and lncRNA research

Semantic technologies (based upon domain ontologies) have been widely adopted in various biological, biomedical, and clinical research areas. Consequently, semantics-oriented data science and computational life sciences have increasingly attracted scientists' attention. In our previous efforts, we have developed a semantic data integration and search software tool named OmniSearch [1], which was specifically designed for the microRNA (miRNA or miR) domain. OmniSearch has been successfully applied in numerous biomedical and clinical areas [2-5] such as: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer (LC), diabetes and diabetic kidney disease (DKD), osteoarthritis (OA), glioblastoma (GBM), and pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). We are currently working on OmniSearch Plus, which was extended from OmniSearch and will cover important non-coding RNA (ncRNA) molecules other than miRNAs, including long ncRNAs (lncRNAs), small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs), and small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs).