Community-Driven and Ontology-Based Biological Knowledge Management: A Hybrid Approach to Harnessing Collective Intelligence

This paper proposes a new approach to knowledge management for systematizing expert knowledge especially biological knowledge among domain expert communities. In order to understand high-order biological phenomena, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the amount of information in the molecular level and the amount of information in the cell functional level. However, the biological knowledge in the cell functional level has not been systematized well so far. We have been seeking a method to systematically describe and understand cellular behaviors in morphogenesis and developed a biological database system called CBDB (Cell Behavior Database). CBDB is an ontology-based and community-based semantic data web on cell behaviors in the RDF format with multimedia data (e.g. texts, images and movies). In the effort, 2 biologists and their 28 students collected 1500 cell phenomena extracted from academic journals and text book for 3 years in CBDB. The fact will conduct to the result that our approach enhances efficiency of knowledge systematization of knowledge on cell behavior by professional community. In this paper, we will elaborate the CBDB and discuss the methodology for systematization of cell behavior knowledge by a domain expert community on a different level of expertise.