Biocarian: A search engine for performing exploratory searches of biological databases

Nazar Zaki, Chandana Tennakoon

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

There are a large number of web-based biological databases publicly available for scientists. In addition, many private databases are generated in the course of research projects. Web standards have evolved in recent times, and semantic web technologies are now available to interconnect diverse and heterogeneous sources of data. Therefore, the integration and querying of biological databases can be facilitated by semantic web techniques. The key idea is to describe data in the Resource Description Format (RDF) and to query them using the SPARQL language. In this paper, we introduce "BioCarian" an efficient and user-friendly search engine that can be used to perform exploratory searches of biological databases. The search engine acts as an interface for running SPARQL queries in RDF databases. In addition, we also provide a graphical interface based on facets that can be used to create advanced SPARQL queries. The facet interface is more advanced and novel than conventional facets. It allows complex queries to be constructed and includes additional features such as allowing facet values to be ranked based on several criteria, visually indicating the relevance of a facet value, and presenting the most important facet values when a large number of choices are available. We have constructed a prototype database that combines public databases that have gene-level, protein-level, and disease-level information. The search engine can be accessed from www.biocarian.com.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the International Conferences on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing 2017 and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2017 - Part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2017
EditorsLuis Rodrigues, Yingcai Xiao, Ajith P. Abraham
PublisherIADIS
Pages333-336
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9789898533661
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Event11th International Conferences on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing, CGVCVIP 2017 and International Conference on Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence, BigDaCI 2017 - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: Jul 21 2017Jul 23 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conferences on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing 2017 and Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2017 - Part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2017

Other

Other11th International Conferences on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing, CGVCVIP 2017 and International Conference on Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence, BigDaCI 2017
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period7/21/177/23/17

Keywords

  • Biological Databases
  • SPARQL
  • Search Engine
  • Semantic Web

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science

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