Visualisation of Ontologies and Large Scale Graphs

February 17, 2010 7 Comments

{{en|A phylogenetic tree of life, showing the ...
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For a whole number of reasons, I am currently looking into the visualisation of large-scale graphs and ontologies and to that end, I have made some notes concerning tools and concepts which might be useful for others. Here they are:

Visualisation by Node-Link and Tree

jOWL: jQuery Plugin for the navigation and visualisation of OWL ontologies and RDFS documents. Visualisations mainly as trees, navigation bars.

OntoViz: Plugin into Protege…at the moment supports Protege 3.4 and doesn’t seem to work with Protege 4.

IsaViz: Much the same as OntoViz really. Last stable version 2004 and does not seem to see active development.

NeOn Toolkit: The Neon toolkit also has some visualisation capability, but not independent of the editor. Under active development with a growing user base.

OntoTrack: OntoTrack is a graphical OWL editor and as such has visualisation capabilities. Meager though and it does not seem to be supported or developed anymore either…the current version seems about 5 years old.

Cone Trees: Cone trees are three-dimensional extensions of 2D tree structures and have been designed to allow for a greater amount odf information to be visualised and navigated. Not found any software for download at the moment, but the idea is so interesting that we should bear it in mind. Examples are here, here and the key reference is Robertson, George G. and Mackinlay, Jock D. and Card, Stuart K., Cone Trees: animated 3D visualizations of hierarchical information, CHI ’91: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 1991, ISBN = 0-89791-383-3, pp.189-194. (DOI here)

PhyloWidget: PhyloWidget is software for the visualisation of phylogenetic trees, but should be repurposable for ontology trees. Javascript – so appropriate for websites. Student project as part of the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code 2007.

The JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit: Extremely pretty JS toolkit for the visualisation of graphs etc…..Dynamic and interactive visualisations too…just pretty. Have spent some time hacking with it and I am becoming a fan.

Welkin: Standalone application for the visualisation of RDF graphs. Allows dynamic filtering, colour coding of resources etc…

Three-Dimensional Visualisation

Ontosphere3D: Visualisation of ontologies on 3D spheres. Does not seem to be supported anymore and requires Java 3D, which is just a bad nightmare in itself.

Cone Trees (see above) with their extension of Disc Trees (for an example of disc trees, see here

3D Hyperbolic Tree as exemplified by the Walrus software. Originally developed for website visualisation, results in stunnign images. Not under active development anymore, but source code available for download.

Cytoscape: The 1000 pound gorilla in the room of large-scale graph visualization. There are several plugins available for interaction with the Gene Ontology, such as BiNGO and ClueGO. Both tools consider the ontologies as annotation rather than a knowledgebase of its own and can be used for the identification of GO terms, which are overrepresented in a cluster/network. In terms of visualisation of ontologies themselves, there is there is the RDFScape plugin, which can visualize ontologies.

Zoomable Visualisations

Jamabalaya – Protege Plugin, but can also run as a browser applet. Uses Shrimp to visualise class hierarchies in ontologies and arrows between boxes to represent relationships.

CropCircles (link is to the paper describing it): CropCircles have been implemented in the SWOOP ontology editor which is not under active development anymore, but where the source code is available.

Information Landscapes – again, no software, just papers.

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Semantic Web Tools and Applications for Life Sciences 2009 – A Personal Summary

November 24, 2009 2 Comments

A bicyclist in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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So another SWAT4LS is behind us, this time wonderfully organised by Andrea Splendiani, Scott Marshall, Albert Burger, Adrian Paschke and Paolo Romano.

I have been back home in Cambridge for a couple of days now and have been asking myself whether there was an overall conclusion from the day – some overarching bottom line that one could take away and against which one could measure the talks at SWAT4LS2010 to see whether there has been progress or not. The programme consisted of a great mixture of both longer keynotes, papers, “highlight posters” and highlight demonstations illustrating a wide range of activities at the semantic web technology – computer science and biomedical research.

Topics at the workshop covered diverse areas such as the analysis of the relationship between  HLA structure variation and disease, applications for maintaining patient records in clinical information systems, patient classification on the basis of semantic image annotations to the use of semantics in chemo- and proteoinformatics and the prediction of drug-target interactions on the basis of sophisticated text mining as well as games such as Onto-Frogger (though I must confess that I somehow missed the point of what that was all about).

So what were the take-home messages of the day? Here are a few points that stood out to me:

  • During his keynote, Alan Ruttenberg coined the dictum of “far too many smart people doing data integration”, which was subsequently taken up by a lot of the other speakers – an indication that most people seemed to agree with the notion that we still spend far too much time dealing with the “mechanics” of data – mashing it up and integrating it, rather than analysing and interpreting it.
  • During last year;s conference, it already became evident that a lot of scientific data is now coming online in a semantic form. The data avalanche has certainly continued and the feeling of an increased amount of data availability, at least in the biosciences, has intensified. While chemistry has been lagging behind, data is becoming available here too. On the one hand, there are Egon’s sterling efforts with openmolecules.net and the data solubility project, on the other, there are big commercial entities like the RSC and ChemSpider. During the meeting, Barend Mons also announced that he had struck an agreement with the RSC/ChemSpider to integrate the content of ChemSpider into his Concept Wiki system. I will reserve judgement as to the usefulness and openness of this until it is further along. In any case, data is trickling out – even in chemistry.
  • Another thing that stood out to me – and I could be quite wrong in this interpretation, given that this was very much a research conference – was the fact that there were many proof-of-principle applications and demonstrators on show, but very few production systems, that made use of semantic technologies at scale. A notable exception to this was the GoPubMed (and related) system demonstrated by Michael Schroeder, who showed how sophisticated text mining can be used not only to find links between seemingly unrelated concepts in the literature, but can also assist in ontology creation and the prediction of drug-target interactions.

Overall, many good ideas, but, as seems to be the case with all of the semantic web, no killer application as to yet – and at every semweb conference I go to we seem to be scrabbling around for one of those. I wonder if there will be one and what it will be.

Thanks to everybody for a good day. It was nice to see some old friends again and make some new ones. Duncan Hull has also written up some notes on the day – so go and read his perspective. I, for one, am looking forward to SWAT4LS2010.

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SWAT4LS2009 – James Eales: Mining Semantic Networks of Bioinformatics eResources from Literature

November 20, 2009 Leave a comment

eResource Annotations could help with

  • making better choices: which resource is best?
  • which is available?
  • reduce curation
  • help with service discovery

Approach: link bioinformatics resources using semantic descriptors generated from text mining….head terms for services can be used to assign services to types..e.g. applications, data sources etc.

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SWAT4LS2009 – Sonja Zillner: Towards the Ontology Based Classification of Lymphoma Patients using Semantic Image Annotation

November 20, 2009 1 Comment

(Again, these are notes as the talk happens)

This has to do with the Siemens Project Theseus Medico – Semantic Medical Image Understanding (towards flexible and scalable access to medical images)

Different images from many different sources: e.g. X-ray, MRI etc…use this and combine with treatment plans, patient data etc and integrate with external knowledge sources.

Example Clinical Query:” Show me theCT scans and records of patiens with a Lymph Node enlargement in the neck area” – at the moment query over several disjoint systems is required

Current Motivation: generic and flexible understanding of images is missing
Final Goal: Enhance medical image annotations by integrating clinical data with images
This talk: introduce a formal classification system for patients (ontological model)

Used Knowledge Sources:

Requirements of the Ontological Model

Now showing an example axiomatisation for the counting and location of lymphatic occurences and discussses problems relating to extending existing ontologies….

Now talking about annotating patient records: typical problems are abbreviations, clinical codes, fragments of sentences etc…difficult for NLP people to deal with….

Now showing detailed patient example where application of their classification system led to reclassification of patient in terms of staging system.

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SWAT4LS2009 – Keynote Alan Ruttenberg: Semantic Web Technology to Support Studying the Relation of HLA Structure Variation to Disease

November 20, 2009 2 Comments

(These are live-blogging notes from Alan’s keynote…so don’t expect any coherent text….use them as bullt points to follow the gist of the argument.)

The Science Commons:

  • a project of the Creative Commons
  • 6 people
  • CC specializes CC to science
  • information discovery and re-use
  • establish legal clarity around data sharing and encourage automated attribution and provenance

Semantic Web for Biologist because it maximizes value o scientific work by removing repeat experimentation.

ImmPort Semantic Integration Feasibility Project

  • Immport is an immunology database and analysis portal
  • Goals:metaanalysis
  • Question: how can ontology help data integration for data from many sources

Using semantics to help integrate sequence features of HLA with disorders
Challenges:

  • Curation of sequence features
  • Linking to disorders
  • Associating allele sequences with peptide structures with nomenclature with secondary structure with human phenotype etc etc etc…

Talks about elements of representation

  • pdb structures translated into ontology-bases respresentations
  • canonical MHC molecule instances constructed from IMGT
  • relate each residue in pdb to the canonical residue if exists
  • use existing ontologies
  • contact points between peptide and other chains computed using JMOL following IMGT. Represented as relation between residue instances.
  • Structural features have fiat parts

Connecting Allele Names to Disease Names

  • use papers as join factors: papers mention both disease and allele – noisy
  • use regex and rewrites applied to titles and abstracts to fish out links between diseases and alleles

Correspondence of molecules with allele structures is difficult.

  • use blast to fiind closest allele match between pdb and allele sequence
  • every pdb and allele residue has URI
  • relate matching molecules
  • relate each allele residue to the canonical allele
  • annotate various residoes with various coordinate systems

This creates massive map that can be navigated and queried. Example queries:

  • What autoimmune diseases can de indexed against a given allele?
  • What are the variant residues at a position?
  • Classification of amino acids
  • Show alleles perturned at contacts of 1AGB

Summary of Progress to Date:
Elements of Approach in Place: Structure, Variation, transfer of annotation via alignment, information extraction from literature etc…

Nuts and Bolts:

  • Primary source
  • Local copy of souce
  • Scripts transforms to RDF
  • Exports RDF Bundles
  • Get selected RDF Bundles and load into triple store
  • Parsers generate in memory structures (python, java)
  • Template files are instructions to fomat these into owl
  • Modeling is iteratively refined by editiing templates
  • RDF loaded into Neurocommons, some amount of reasoning

RDFHerd package management for data

neurocommons.org/bundles

Can we reduce the burden of data integration?

  • Too many people are doing data integration – wasting effort
  • Use web as platform
  • Too many ontologies…here’s the social pressure again

Challenges

  • have lawyers bless every bit of data integration
  • reasoning over triple stores
  • SPARQL over HTTP
  • Understand and exploit ontology and reasoning
  • Grow a software ecosystem like Firefox
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Hello from Hinxton

November 3, 2009 Leave a comment

So in my last post I pretty much said good-bye to the Unilever Centre and the people there and now it is time for a hello – a hello to a new job. I have recently joined the Department of Genetics and the group of Prof Ashburner as a Research Associate. While I am formally employed by the university, I will, however, spend most of my time at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the group of Christoph Steinbeck.

My remit here will be to continue to develop chemical ontology and in particular to help, together with my colleagues and the ChEBI user community, to put the ChEBI ontology onto a “formal” footing and to align it with the upper ontology used by the OBO Foundry ontologies. I will blog more about this as the story develops – however, for now, I am very excited about this new opportunity. I have a great set of new colleagues (Duncan Hull has also just joined the ChEBI team and has blogged about it) both in the ChEBI group as well as in the wider EBI community and there is a community of people here that believe in the value of this type of work. So I am very much looking forward to helping create some exciting ontology and resources of value to the chemical and biological community.

As I was walking across the Genome campus this morning, I couldn’t help but to be struck by its beauty – here are some pictures I shot with my mobile phone:

Hinxton High Street

Hinxton High Street - On the way to the Genome Campus


Genome Campus - By Hinxton Hall

Genome Campus - By Hinxton Hall

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ChemAxiom: An Ontology for Chemistry 2. The Set-Up

April 8, 2009 4 Comments

Now that I have introduced at least some of the motivation behind ChemAxiom, let me outline some of the mechanics.

ChemAxiom is a collective term for a set of ontologies, all of which make a start at describing subdomains within chemistry. The ontology modules are independent and self-contained and can (largely) be developed seperately and concurrently. Although they are independent, they are interoperable and integrated via a common upper ontology – in the case of ChemAxiom, we have chosen the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). I will blog the reasons for this choice in the next post.

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The ontologies are currently in various stages of axiomatisation depending on how long we have been working on them and how much we have had a chance to play – so therefore, if there are axioms there that are not and you think there should be, or if you agree/disagree with some of our design decisions, please let us know. In any case, the discussion has already started with some helpful comments over on the Google Group. Let me describe the various modules in greater detail:

The Reasons for Modularity: When developing ontologies, it is always tempting to develop the ueber-McDaddy-ontology-of-everything, because, of course, ontology development is, by definition, never done: we alsways need more than we have  – more terms, more axioms etc.. Very quickly, this can result in monstrously large and virtually unmaintainable constructs. Modularisation has, from out perspective, the advantage of (a) smaller and more handlable ontologies, (b) ontologies which are easier to maintain, (c) ontologies which can be developed in parallel or orthogonally and subsequently integrated using either a common upper ontology or mapping/rules etc…..Furthermore, if refactoring of ontologies is necessary during the development process, this is also facilitated by modularity: changes in one module have less chance of affecting changes in another module.

The General Use Case: One of the things we are particularly interested in here in Cambridge, is the extraction of chemical entities and data from text and Peter Corbett’s OSCAR is now fairly well established within the chemical informatics community. Our text sources vary widely, and can range from standard chemical papers to theses, blogs and Wikipedia pages. To give you an impression of the types of data we are talking about, there’s an example Wikipedia’s infobox for benzene (somewhat truncated):

 

benzene infobox for blog 

So we have to deal with names, identifiers of various type, physico-chemical property data as well as the corresponding metadata (e.g. measurement pressures, measurement temperatures etc.), and chemical structure (InChI, SMILES). Our ontologies should enable us the generate RDF that allow us to hold this data – the ontology here serves as a schema. While we are interested in reasoning/using reasoners for the purposes of (retrospective) typing (again, I will explain what I mean by that in subsequent blog posts) applying ontologies to the description of chemical data is our first use-case.

With all of that said, let me provide a quick summary of the modules:

Chemistry Domain Ontology – ChemAxiomDomain ChemAxiomDomain is the first module in the set. It is currently a small ontology, which clarifies some fundamental relationships in the chemistry domain. Key concepts in this ontology are “ChemicalElement”, “ChemicalSpecies” and “MolecularEntity” as well as “Role”. ChemAxiomDomain clarifies the relationships between these terms (see my previous blog post) and also deals with identifiers etc. Chemical roles too are important: while chemical entities, may be or act as nucleophiles, acids, solvents etc.. some of the time, they do not have these roles all of the time – roles are realisable entities and and ChemAxiomDomain provides a mechanism for dealing with that. There are few other high-level domain concepts in there at the moment, though obviously we are looking to expand as and when the need arises and use-cases are provided.I will blog some details in a subsequent blog post.

Properties Ontology – ChemAxiomProp. ChemAxiomProp is an ontology of over 150 chemical and materials properties, together with a first set of definitions and symbols (where available and appropriate) and some axioms for typing of properties. Again, details will follow in a subsequent blog post.

Measurement Techniques – ChemAxiomMetrology. This is an ontology of over 200 measurement techniques and also contains a list of instrument parts and axioms for typing of measurement techniques. It does not currently include information about minimum information requirements for measurement techniques (e.g. the measurement of a boiling point also requires a measurement of pressure) and other metadata, but this will be added at a later stage. Again, a detailed blog-post will follow.

ChemAxiomPoly and ChemAxiomPolyClass – These two ontologies contain terms which are in common use across polymer science as well as a taxonomy of polymers based on the composition of their backbone (though the latter is not axiomatised yet). Details will follow in a further blog post.

ChemAxiomMeta – ChemAxiomMeta is a developing ontology, that will allow the specification of provenance of data (e.g. data derived from wiki pages etc.) and will also define what a journal, journal article, thesis, thesis chapter etc is and what the relationships between these entities are. We have not currently released this yet. Details will follow in a further blog post.

ChemAxiomComtinuants – ChemAxionContinuants represents an integration of all the above sub-ontologies into an ontological framework for chemical continuants (with some occurrents mixed in when we need to talk about measurement techniques). Details will follow in a further blog post.

We have also started to work on ontologies of chemical reactions, actions and, as mentioned above, minimum information requirements – however, these are at a relatively early stage of development and hence not released yet.

So much for a short overview over the mechanics of the ontologies. I am sure there are a thousand other things I should have said, but that will have to
do for now. Comments and suggestions via the usual channels. Automatic links and tags, as always, by Zemanta.

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The Unilever Centre @ Semantic Technology 2009

April 7, 2009 1 Comment

In a previous blogpost, I had already announced, that both Jim and I had been accepted to speak at Semantic Technology 2009 in San Jose.

Well, the programme for the conference is out now and looks even more mind-blowing (in a very good way) than last year. Jim and I will be speaking on Tuesday, 16th June at 14:00. Here’s our talk abstracts:

PART I | Lensfield – The Working Scientist’s Linked Data Space Elevator (Jim Downing)

The vision of Open Linked Data in long-tail science (as opposed to Big Science, high energy physics, genomics etc) is an attractive one, with the possibility of delivering abundant data without the need for massive centralization. In achieving that vision we face a number of practical challenges. The principal challenge is the steep learning curve that scientists face in dealing with URIs, web deployment, RDF, SPARQL etc. Additionally most software that could generated Linked Data runs off-web, on workstations and internal systems. The result of this is that the desktop filesystem is likely remain the arena for the production of data in the near to medium term. Lensfield is a data repository system that works with the filesystem model and abstracts semantic web complexities away from scientists who are unable to deal with them. Lensfield makes it easy for researchers to publish linked data without leaving their familiar working environment. The presentation of this system will include a demonstration of how we have extended Lensfield to produce a Linked Data publication system for small molecule data.

PART II | The Semantic Chemical World Wide Web (Nico Adams)

The development of modern new drugs, new materials and new personal care products requires the confluence of data and ideas from many different scientific disciplines and enabling scientists to ask questions of heterogeneous data sources is crucial for future innovation and progress. The central science in much of this is chemistry and therefore the development of a “semantic infrastructure” for this very important vertical is essential and of direct relevance to large industries such as the pharmaceuticals and life sciences, home and personal care and, of course, the classical chemical industry. Such an infrastructure shouls include a range of technological capabilities, from the representation of molecules and data in semantically rich form to the availability of chemistry domain ontologies and the ability to extract data from unstructured sources.

The talk will discuss the development of markup languages and ontologies for chemicals and materials (data). It will illustrate how ontologies can be used for indexing, faceted search and retrieval of chemical information and for the “axiomatisation” of chemical entities and materials beyond simple notions of chemical structure. The talk will discuss the use of linked data to generate new chemical insight and will provide a brief discussion of the use of entity extraction and natural language processing for the “semantification” of chemical information.

But that’s not all. Lezan has been accepted to present a poster and so she will be there too,, showing off her great work on the extraction and semantification of chemical reaction data from the literature. Here is her abstract:

The domain of chemistry is central to a large number of significant industries such as the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry, the home and personal care industry as well as the “classical” chemical industry. All of these are research-intensive and any innovation is crucially dependent on the ability to connect data from heterogeneous sources: in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, the ability to link data about chemical compounds, with toxicology data, genomic and proteomic data, pathway data etc. is crucial. The availability of a semantic infrastructure for chemistry will be a significant factor for the future success of this industry. Unfortunately, virtually all current chemical knowledge and data is generated in non-semantic form and in many silos, which makes such data integration immensely difficult.

In order to address these issues, the talk will discuss several distinct, but related areas, namely chemical information extraction, information/data integration, ontology-aided information retrieval and information visualization. In particular, we demonstrate how chemical data can be retrieved from a range of unstructured sources such as reports, scientific theses and papers or patents. We will discuss how these sources can be processed using ontologies, natural language processing techniques and named-entity recognisers to produce chemical data and knowledge expressed in RDF. We will furthermore show, how this information can be searched and indexed. Particular attention will also be paid to data representation and visualisation using topic/topology maps and information lenses. At the end of the talk, attendees should have a detailed awareness of how chemical entities and data can be extracted from unstructured sources and visualised for rapid information discovery and knowledge generation.

It promises to be a great conference and I am sure our minds will go into overdrive when there….can’t wait to go! See you there!?

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Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences – Afternoon Session

December 1, 2008 1 Comment

Tutorial: The W3C Interest Group on Semantic Web Technologies for Health Care and Life Sciences (M.S. Marshall)

“Scientists should be able to work in terms of commonly used concepts

The scientist should be able to ork in terms of personal concepts and hypotheses (not forced to map concepts to the terms that have been chosed for him)

Otherwise general overview over what the interest groups does and how it works….link to the webpage is here.

To participate email [email protected]

Task Forces:

  • Terminology
  • Linking Open Drug Data
  • Scientific Discourse
  • Clinical Observations Interoperability
  • BioRDF – integrated neuroscience knowledge base
  • Other Projects – clinical decision support, URI workshop

Paper in IEEE Software: SOftware design for empoweriing scientists

I stopped blogging after this mainly because my batteries were dry and there was a scarmble for the power sockets in the room I did not wishh to participate in. During the meeting some people said they were blogging this and that there was some discussion on Friendfeed….but I can’t find anything much on either. If anybody has a few links, please give me a shout and I will happily link out.

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