Data Semantic Integration

The GIB has developed a tool capable of automatically processing complex queries involving multiple databases and web medical genetics. For a biomedical researcher, this is manually long and tedious search. The investigation would involve recovering the OMIM code from a disease, then enter this code in the database «Entrez Gene» to retrieve all the genes involved, after that get the standard symbol for each of these genes in the «Human Gene Nomenclature» then obtain the associated proteins of these genes from «Swissprot«, to finally obtain the 3D structure of these proteins from various databases that provide this information. The implementation of our tool  automatically  generates particular queries to obtain search results for specific flows. This search process is encapsulated in a «Web Service» that is available online.

In 2001 the Biomedical Informatics Group launched INFOGENMED, the first project funded by the European Commission in the area of clinico-genomic data integration. We developed the «ONTOFUSION» system which provides unified access to multiple, heterogeneous biological and medical data sources from over 1500 public databases. We used the system to integrate variety of information resources such as: OMIM, PubMed, Enzyme, Proposite and Proposite documentation, PDB, SNP, InterPro, etc. Since then, ONTOFUSION has become one of the main references in the field.