for creating hierarchies and structured meta-data specialized to new information
types. Ontologies imbue data with a defined semantic meaning and a comput-
able logical model that can later be used to visualize, query, and collate [14] the
structured data in a way that is impossible with plain text.
18.4.1 Biomedical Ontologies
Ontologies have been applied to organizing facts and observations since the 17th
century. An ontology can be defined simply as a controlled vocabulary. In the
present day, the use of ontologies in biology and medicine has become so
prevalent that it could be considered mainstream [15]. An ontology can describe
how empirical data was generated. For example, the MIAME standard defines
a minimal set of information about microarray ...