Towards a semantic wiki for human and animal cell lines

Abstract

Wiki systems have emerged as a social network tool able to stimulate users to contribute to the collaborative building of a common knowledge base. Some of the specific aims of wikis for biology (bio-wikis) include collaborative efforts for the development and sharing of knowledge, the annotation of database contents, and the creation of database contents. Indeed, the increasing volumes of biological data cannot be adequately managed by the existing centralised databases and database curators. On the contrary,  information and data must be exchanged by the whole community. Special features may be required to adapt to the specificity of biological data. Moreover, integration with the most relevant biological databases must be implemented. In this context, Semantic technologies promise to be of paramount relevance. In this abstract, we present a preliminary analysis for the implementation of a semantic wiki system for human and animal cell lines derived from the Cell Line Data Base (CLDB) and tightly connected to external relevant resources.