I received this comment from my post on the Cold Spring Harbor Conference on controlling stem cells.

Monya wrote: Toward the end of the conference, I had started classifying talks. That way, even if I couldn’t remember what HUH1.1 stood for, I didn’t feel completely lost. The most common type slots individual components into networks. Many conclusion slides exclaimed triumphantly “X targets Y in cell Z under conditions of W”

Perhaps the next most common type of talk identified or characterized cell types. “Cell A makes molecules B,C, and D but not E”. This was often, but still too infrequently, followed by “Cell A does action Y in environment Z.”

One of the challenges and opportunities that exist within the stem cell research community is to organize such information into a computable formulation that can be used to build reasoning from sparse resources of data by combining results from different reports in a structured and annotated format. To accomplish this task effectively, the most cutting-edge and farsighted approach is to use Ontologies.