Conceptual Modeling of Proteins Based on UniProt

Abstract

Clinical disease states reflect the interaction of a myriad of genetic and environ-mental contributions. In this context, a major challenge is to develop information systems and algorithms that can describe this complexity to facilitate an under-standing of the disease mechanisms as well as to guide the development and ap-plication of therapies. This work focuses on describing how a shared understand-ing of the domain can be achieved by analyzing the conceptual precision of the main concepts that should constitute the ontological commitment that is strictly required when studying an important area of research: the role that proteins play in the different functions carried out within the cell of any living systems. The contribution of this paper is to show the conceptual complexity of the UniProtKB database, and to let users face and manage that complexity by providing a sound and well-grounded conceptual background to achieve the shared understanding of the domain, a crucial aspect to allow the design of any fruitful data analytics-based strategy. A conceptual model for proteins is carefully developed taking the UniProtKB database as data source, explaining in detail the problems that have been faced together with their corresponding solutions.