This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. GlycO is a highly expressive ontology that embodies knowledge of glycan structure and the relationships between the structure of glycans and their participation in biological processes. With GlycO we are aiming at a general description of the glycobiology domain that consists of a robust schema and large knowledgebase. The schema conceptually defines classes (e.g., the class containing all N-glycans ) to which specific instances are assigned and the knowledgebase is comprised of instances (e.g., a specific glycan structure) and specific relationships between instances. The schema allows reasoning about the concepts by exploiting the Web Ontology Language OWL-DL (based on Description Logic) to place restrictions on relationships. This provides the basis for automated population of the knowledge base, a process in which new instances are added and classified. The information needed to populate the GlycO knowledgebase is automatically extracted from several partially overlapping sources, including the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), Glycosciences.de databases (SweetDB), and the Complex Carbohydrate Structural Database (CARBBANK). In order to avoid multiple entries of identical structures, transformation and disambiguation techniques are applied. The ultimate goal is to generate a large ontology that can be used for the annotation, retrieval and processing of information regarding glycan structure-function relationships and the discovery of the knowledge implicit in that information.
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