Ontologies for molecular biology

Molecular biology has a communication problem. There are many databases using their own labels and categories for storing data objects and some using identical labels and categories but with a different meaning. A prominent example is the concept "gene" which is used with different semantics by major international genomic databases. Ontologies are one means to provide a semantic repository to systematically order relevant concepts in molecular biology and to bridge the different notions in various databases by explicitly specifying the meaning of and relation between the fundamental concepts in an application domain. Here, the upper level and a database branch of a prospective ontology for molecular biology (OMB) is presented and compared to other ontologies with respect to suitability for molecular biology (http:/(/)igd.rz-berlin.mpg.de/approximately www/oe/mbo.html).