Bridging biological ontologies and biosimulation: the ontology of physics for biology.

ABSTRACT

We introduce and define the Ontology of Physics for Biology (OPB), a reference ontology of physical principles that bridges the gap between bioinformat-ics modeling of biological structures and the bio-simulation modeling of biological processes. Where-as modeling anatomical entities is relatively well-studied, representing the physics-based semantics of biosimulation and biological processes remains an open research challenge. The OPB bridges this semantic gap-linking the semantics of biosimulation mathematics to structural bio-ontologies. Our design of the OPB is driven both by theory and pragmatics we have applied systems dynamics theory to build an ontology with pragmatic use for annotating biosimulation models.