BiPOm: Biological interlocked Process Ontology for metabolism. How to infer molecule knowledge from biological process?

In this paper, we introduce a new ontology BiPOm1. describing metabolic processes as interlocked subsystems while explicitly formalizing the active states of the involved molecules. We further showed that the annotation of molecules such as molecular types or molecular properties can be deduced using SWRL rules and automatic reasoning on instances of BiPOm. The information necessary to instantiate BiPOm can be extracted from existing databases or existing bio-ontologies. Altogether, this results in a paradigm shift where the anchorage of knowledge is rerouted from the molecule to the biological process.