Towards ontology-enabled BioContexts for bioinformatics research

The evolution of web technologies seems to characterize a new scenario for biomedical researchers who take advantage from sophisticated ontologies offered by scientific portals. This paper introduces the concept of BioContext, a software environment which combines services for the fully exploitation of several ontologies whose knowledge is captured, and managed in a local repository. We illustrate our ideas pragmatically by presenting BCnotes, a BioContext which enables the functional annotation of biomedical texts in order to discover important relationships among genes.