From biological data to biological knowledge

Large scale biological knowledge still organization remains a challenge in life sciences. Not only because related information is spread across several distributed information resources, but also because context dependent information retrieval suffers from an absence of semantic capabilities in biological databases. This prevents intelligent interpretation of data beyond simple key word searches as well as the inference of implicit biological knowledge. We will discuss in this paper the urgent need for semantic technologies for knowledge organization in life sciences and a prototype based on Topic Maps and distributed technologies.