GO faster ChEBI with Reasonable Biochemistry

Abstract

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a database and ontology that represents biochemical knowledge about small molecules. Recent changes to the ontology have created new opportunities for automated reasoning with description logic, that have not previously been fully exploited in Chemistry. These changes open up the possibility of building an improved chemical semantic web, by making more use of necessary and sufficient conditions, allowing reasoning about chemical structure, highlighting ambiguous inconsistencies and improving alignment with the Gene Ontology (GO). This paper briefly discusses some of the problems with reasoning over the current version of ChEBI, to tackle these issues, and their potential solutions.