Open Biological Expression Language (OpenBEL)

In biotechnology and life sciences, the use of the Biological Expression Language (BEL) or OpenBEL and its standard way of expressing information can accelerate the pace of technology innovation and scientific discovery in areas such as network visualization of neural brain function; understanding of complex inter-related disease biology; comparison of human diseases with various animal models; deep investigation of drug efficacy and toxicity; as well as development of innovative therapeutics and diagnostics for personalized healthcare.

The OpenBEL project advances these disciplines with the use of a common Biological Expression Language (BEL) that represents scientific findings in a computable form by capturing causal and correlative relationships in context. It also includes the BEL framework, an open platform designed to capture, integrate and store knowledge within an organization and with its partners. Central to the design of the framework is the ability to integrate knowledge across different representational vocabularies and ontologies. This allows organizations to combine knowledge from disparate sources into centralized knowledge repositories.