SISELS: Semantic Integration System for Exploitation of Biological Resources

This article describes general architecture and construction principles to develop a Biology virtual laboratory through SISELS. SISELS is a mediation system that enables the configuration of virtual laboratories to provide transparent access to distributed biological resources (data or services). SISELS exploits the metadata associated to the subscribed resources to classify and organize them respect to their structure and content. This way, it is possible to generate subspaces of resources, denominated views respect to the requirements of a group of experts to study a biological problem. A view represents the semantic requirements of a group of experts and a subset of relevant resources satisfying partially or totally these requirements. SISELS uses three main levels of metadata to model the knowledge domain of the virtual laboratory based on the resources´ metadata and the semantic correspondences between the resources and the domain.