Biological processes can be expressed from multiple perspectives. One basic perspective involves specifying the process steps, how they are ordered, their participants, and how participants are involved in different steps. Two additional perspectives on processes are how energy is transferred and how the processes are regulated. Such perspectives are essential for understanding the basic mechanisms of biology. We consider a representation of energy transfer and regulation for biological processes, and consider several example questions that can be answered using this representation. Our work is driven by the description of processes in an introductory biology textbook and provides the ontology design for an education application.

In the fall 2010 issue of the AI Magazine, we reported the design, implementation and evaluation of a knowledge acquisition system called AURA. AURA enables domain experts in Physics, Chemistry and Biology to author their knowledge, and a different set of experts to pose questions against that knowledge. The evaluation results previously reported were from 50 pages each from science textbooks in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The results were most promising for Biology. Based on those results we undertook a content building effort to capture knowledge from approximately 315 pages (or 20 chapters) of the same Biology textbook [2] and incorporated the resulting content in the electronic version of that book. In this demo/poster session, we will demonstrate the biology knowledge base (KB) created using AURA, the electronic textbook application Inquire, and discuss the knowledge engineering process we used to construct the KB.