ProKinO: A Framework for Protein Kinase Ontology

Protein kinases play a prominent role in cell regulation and disease, which has given rise to an abundance of information about the structure, function, disease, pathway, interaction and evolution of these proteins. This information, however, is currently spread across several heterogeneous resources, an obstacle to the kind of integrative approaches needed in utilizing existing knowledge for research related to diseases. We have designed and developed an ontology for protein kinases, ProKinO, that serves as a useful and efficient representation of the integrated knowledge about these complex proteins which are intimately involved in the genesis and behavior of cancer cells. Concepts and relationships in ProKinO capture important knowledge about kinases while ProKinO instances represent a wealth of data acquired from disparate resources, including KinBase, COSMIC, UniProt, and Reactome. We have created a customized ontology browser for ProKinO. Also, we used ProKinO to do a variety of integrative analyses using SPARQL queries.