Role of the Ontologies in the Context of Grid Computing and Application for the Human Disease Studies

We describe the increasing impact of ontologies in the context of Grid computing for obtaining, comparing and analyzing distributed heterogeneous scientific data. The inherently autonomous and heterogeneous nature of the information resources forces applications to share data and services often without prior knowledge of their structure and functionality, respectively. Ontologies are needed to provide a way to capture and present in the computer, knowledge shared by all people in a certain community. Computer based ontologies may be seen as shared formal conceptualizations of domain knowledge and therefore constitute an essential resource for enabling interoperation in an open environment such as the Web on the Grid. We illustrate how ontologies can be developed for the knowledge domain of biomedical and bio-engineering research. We chose the application domain of human disease research and control since it necessarily involves resources of phenotypic, genetic, environmental and treatment data.