Perspectives of a systems biology of the synapse: how to transform an indefinite data space into a model?

Understanding the synapse and its role in the development of psychiatric disorders is not only a demanding but a highly relevant challenge for neuroscience. With the advancement of modern high-throughput technologies, the amount of data collected becomes incomprehensible and the volume of information intractable for the individual scientist. Why Systems Biology opens alternatives to organize information and to deduce knowledge that can be scrutinized by rationally designed experiments? We discuss some of the fundamental ideas why Systems Biology is indeed an alternative to reductionism and show an example how semantics may help to exploit the rich source of the scientific literature to generate qualitative models of functional modules.