Contact: dr. A.P. Gibson
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
NEWS: PeroxisomeKB v1.5 released
Looking for PeroxisomeKB? Go here!

Welcome

BioExpert is going through some major changes, and we are integrating lots of exiting new technologies into our software. So for now we are just giving you an overview of what we are doing, and we hope you will come back and look out for updates to our work.
We were at ISMB 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden. You can find a PDF of our poster here.

What do we do?

We want to empower researchers with the ability to represent their knowledge in an intuitive way, to create high quality knowledge bases that focus on specific topics in biology.
We want to use cutting edge Semantic Web technologies to represent the knowledge specified by the experts, allowing us to do nice things with storage, integration and querying of expert knowledge.

Concept Maps

We know that accurate knowledge representation is hard without some experience and we need a way for people to describe their knowledge. Concept maps (like the one below) are our main focus, because they allow experts to roughly draw out what they know about how concepts in their domain are related, much like the figures you might see in a journal article.

The BioExpert Framework

This is the technical side of the project. We want our knowledge bases to be linked to all those other relevant things on the Web, and we want our knowledge to have added meaning for computers, semantics. A combination of RDF, OWL and SKOS representations stored in an RDF Triplestore gives the BioExpert framework the capabilities and more.

The Peroxisome Knowledge Base

We are continuing to create a pilot knowledge base. Concept maps are being developed and curated in direct collaboration with experts on peroxisome biochemistry and peroxisomal related diseases in humans. The Peroxisome Knowledge Base intends to take the lead in resources for knowledge about peroxisomes.
Unfortunately, the major changes we talked about means we have temporarily taken down the old interface to the Peroxisome KB. Feel free to contact us for more information on our project, and keep an eye on this space for more information as we continue to improve the website.

Project members include prof. dr. A.H.C. van Kampen, dr. A.P. Gibson, dr. G.A. Jansen, and drs. S.L. Barth.
For a full list of project members, click here.