SBOL Semantic

SBOL Semantic is a language for representing and sharing information about standardized biological parts.

The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) effort aims to standardize methods of transferring information needed for the description of standardized parts for Synthetic Biology. To accomplish this goal in terms of data transfer over the network, SBOL Semantic provides an implementation of the data model using W3C Semantic Web standards.

The data model is encoded as an OWL-DL ontology. This simple ontology allows for the description of data elements in terms of Classes (i.e. Parts, Sequence Features, etc), the object properties, relationships, between them (ie. [has]feature, [has]annotation, etc) and data properties (i.e. name, author, short description, etc).

The OWL definitions provide both structure and definition for the data. Data encoded using OWL is provided in RDF/XML syntax which allows the use of standard parsers and query languages to access the encoded information. RDF/XML syntax may be parsed directly from the file form, or can be accessed using a query protocol (i.e. SPARQL).

Read more about SBOL and Synthetic Biology here.