Provenance of microarray experiments for a better understanding of experiment results

This paper describes a Semantic Web (SW) model for gene lists and the metadata required for their practical interpretation. Our provenance information captures the context of experiments as well as the processing and analysis parameters involved in deriving the gene lists from DNA microarray experiments. We demonstrate a range of practical neuroscience queries which draw on the proposed model. Our provenance representation includes the origins of the gene list and basic information about the data set itself (e.g. last modification date and original data source), in order to facilitate the federation of gene lists with other types of Semantic Web-formatted data and include the integration of a broader molecular context through additional omics data.