Towards an upper level ontology for molecular biology.

There is a growing need for the general-purpose description of the basic conceptual entities in the life sciences. Up until now, upper level models have mainly been purpose-driven, such as the GENIA ontology, originally devised as a vocabulary for corpus annotation. As an alternative,we here present BioTop, a description-logic-based top level ontology for molecular biology, which we consider as an ontologically conscious redesign of the GENIA ontology.