Title:	BIOCARIAN: A SEARCH ENGINE FOR PERFORMING EXPLORATORY SEARCHES OF BIOLOGICAL DATABASES
Author(s):	Nazar Zaki and Chandana Tennakoon
ISBN:	978-989-8533-66-1
Editors:	Yingcai Xiao and Ajith P. Abraham
Year:	2017
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Semantic Web, Search Engine, Biological Databases, SPARQL
Type:	Short Paper
First Page:	333
Last Page:	336
Language:	English
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Paper Abstract:	There are a large number of web-based biological databases publicly available for scientists. In addition, many private databases are generated in the course of research projects. Web standards have evolved in recent times, and semantic web technologies are now available to interconnect diverse and heterogeneous sources of data. Therefore, the integration and querying of biological databases can be facilitated by semantic web techniques. The key idea is to describe data in the Resource Description Format (RDF) and to query them using the SPARQL language. In this paper, we introduce “BioCarian” an efficient and user-friendly search engine that can be used to perform exploratory searches of biological databases. The search engine acts as an interface for running SPARQL queries in RDF databases. In addition, we also provide a graphical interface based on facets that can be used to create advanced SPARQL queries. The facet interface is more advanced and novel than conventional facets. It allows complex queries to be constructed and includes additional features such as allowing facet values to be ranked based on several criteria, visually indicating the relevance of a facet value, and presenting the most important facet values when a large number of choices are available. We have constructed a prototype database that combines public databases that have gene-level, protein-level, and disease-level information. The search engine can be accessed from www.biocarian.com.
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