Molecular biology has a communication problem. There are many databases using their own labels and catagories for storing data objects and some using identical labels and catagories but with a different meaning. A prominent example is the concept "gene" which is used with different semantics by major international genomic databases. Ontologies are one means to provide a semantic repository to systematically order elevant concepts in molecular biology and to bridge the different notions in varous databases by explicitly specifying the maeaning of and relation between the fundamental conepts in an application domain. Here, the upper level and a database branch of a prospective ontology for molecular biology (OMB) is presented and compared to other ontologies with respect to suitability for molecular biology (htto://igd.rz-berlin.mpg.de/approxwww/oe/mbo.html).
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