FAIRsharing record for: Biological Expression Language

This FAIRsharing record describes: BEL is a language for representing scientific findings in the life sciences in a reusable, shareable, and computable form. BEL is designed to represent scientific findings by capturing causal and correlative relationships in context, where context can include information about the biological and experimental system in which the relationships were observed, the supporting publications cited and the process of curation. BEL is intended as a knowledge capture and interchange medium, supporting the operation of systems that integrate knowledge derived from independent efforts. The language is designed to be use-neutral, facilitating the storage and use of structured knowledge for inference by applications through a knowledge assembly process that can create computable biological networks. While BEL does not prescribe any particular assembly process or any particular knowledge format for the output of an assembly process, a suite of software components called the BEL Framework provides everything necessary to create, compile, assemble, and deliver computable knowledge models to BEL-aware applications. The current version of BEL provides the means to describe biological interactions qualitatively but not to quantify the magnitude or rate of these interactions. This limitation is by design because this quantitative information has significant variability and is not consistently reported in the literature. It is our hope that future versions of BEL can accommodate these additional data.

本FAIRsharing条目描述如下：BEL语言（BEL）是一种可在生命科学领域以可复用、可共享且可计算的形式呈现科学发现的专用语言。BEL旨在通过捕获情境化的因果与关联关系来刻画科学发现，其中情境可涵盖观测到此类关系的生物与实验系统信息、所引用的支撑性文献以及编审流程。BEL被设计为知识获取与交换媒介，可支持对源自独立研究工作的知识进行整合的各类系统的运行。该语言采用用途中立的设计思路，可通过可生成可计算生物网络的知识组装流程，助力应用程序依托结构化知识开展推理，实现结构化知识的存储与使用。尽管BEL未规定特定的组装流程或组装输出的专属知识格式，但一套名为BEL框架（BEL Framework）的软件组件套件，可提供创建、编译、组装并向支持BEL的应用程序交付可计算知识模型所需的全部功能。当前版本的BEL仅能定性描述生物相互作用，无法量化此类相互作用的强度或速率。这种限制是设计使然，因为此类定量信息存在显著变异性，且在学术文献中并未得到统一报道。我们期望未来版本的BEL能够兼容这类额外的数据。