A Method for Comparison of Standardized Information Within Systems Biology

Standards and standardized data representation to allow efficient exchange of information is an important topic within systems biology. Within this area there is currently a rapid development of new standards as well as a need for import of datasets into various computer tools for further analysis. As the number of available standards within systems biology is large, tools for comparison and translation of standards are of high interest. In this paper we present a method for comparison of standards. We illustrate how the method works by providing an analysis of the three standards SBML, PSI MI and BioPAX. The analysis gives information on how similar the three standards are and it also gives pointers on how to build tools to aid a user in the analysis of a standard