Current bioinformatics tools or databases are very heterogeneous in terms of data formats, database schema, and terminologies. Additionally, most biomedical databases and analysis tools are scattered across different web sites making interoperability across such different services more difficult. It is desired that these diverse databases and analysis tools be normalized, integrated and encompassed with a semantic interface such that users of biological data and tools could communicate with the system in natural language and a workflow could be automatically generated and distributed into appropriate tools. In this paper, the BioSemantic System is presented to bridge complex biological/biomedical research problems and computational solutions via semantic computing. Due to the diversity of problems in various research fields, the semantic capability description language (SCDL) plays an important role as a common language and generic form for problem formalization. Several queries as well as their corresponding SCDL descriptions are provided as examples. For complex applications, multiple SCDL queries may be connected via control structures. For these cases, we present an algorithm to map a user request to one or more existing services if they exist.

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References

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