ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING: THE BRAIN GENE ONTOLOGY CASE STUDY Submitted by

The emergence of ontologies has marked another stage in the evolution of knowledge engineering. In the biomedical domain especially, a notable number of ontologies have been developed for knowledge acquisition, maintenance, sharing and reuse from large and distributed databases in order to reach the critical requirements of biomedical analysis and application. This research aims at the development of a Brain Gene Ontology by adopting a constructive IS methodology which tightly combines the processes of ontology learning, building, reuse and evaluation together. Brain Gene Ontology is a part of the BGO project that is being developed by KEDRI (Gottgtroy and Jain, 2005). The objective is to represent knowledge of the genes and proteins that are related to specific brain disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia. The current stage focuses on the crucial neuronal parameters such as AMPA, GABA, CLC and SCN through their direct or indirect interactions with other genes and proteins. In this case, ontological representations were able to provide the conceptual framework and the knowledge itself to understand more about relationships amon