Vempati Uma D., Schürer Stephan C.
Center for Computational Science, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine., University of Miami, Florida.
Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology,, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine., University of Miami, Florida
Ontologies are important tools to organize information and formalize knowledge in a subject domain. In this chapter, the authors introduce Bioassay Ontology (BAO), the first ontology to describe and categorize chemical biology and drug screening assays and their results. BAO has been applied to standardize, organize and annotate assays and screening results to enable analysis and information extraction across multiple and diverse data sets, with the goal to infer new knowledge about the molecular mechanism of action of small molecules in the assay model systems. The authors provide an overview of BAO and present several applications, including the annotation of a large number of HTS assays and an assay annotation tool (BioAssayAnnotationTemplate). BAO has also been used in a software tool (BAOSearch) to enable query and exploration of assay experiments and results via a simple user interface. BAO is an evolving ontology with a growing nymber of applications and user community.
本体是在一个主题领域中组织信息和形式化知识的重要工具。在本章中，作者介绍了生物测定本体（BAO），这是第一个用于描述和分类化学生物学及药物筛选测定及其结果的本体。BAO已被应用于对测定和筛选结果进行标准化、组织和注释，以实现跨多个不同数据集的分析和信息提取，目标是推断关于小分子在测定模型系统中作用分子机制的新知识。作者提供了BAO的概述，并展示了几个应用，包括对大量高通量筛选测定的注释以及一个测定注释工具（生物测定注释模板）。BAO还被用于一个软件工具（BAOSearch），通过简单的用户界面实现对测定实验和结果的查询与探索。BAO是一个不断发展的本体，其应用数量和用户群体都在不断增加。
