Semi-automated microRNA ontology development based on artificial neural networks

microRNAs (miRNAs) are special non-coding RNAs that perform important roles through their target genes. Biologists´ conventional miRNA knowledge discovery is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. Semantic technologies, which are created upon domain ontologies, can greatly enhance miRNA knowledge discovery. Unfortunately, yet no specific miRNA domain ontologies currently exist. It thus motivates the construction of a miRNA ontology. In addition, a manual ontology development has many drawbacks. We present in this paper a semi-automated ontology development methodology. The developed ontology is the very first one of its kind that formally encodes miRNA domain knowledge. It aims to provide data exchange standards and common data elements and thus help identify novel data connections among heterogeneous sources.