Nanoinformatics: Developing Advanced Informatics Applications for Nanomedicine - Intracellular Delivery: Fundamentals and Applications - page 852

systematizing information and knowledge, particularly in the biomedical field (Smith
et al. 2007 ). Ontologies are currently a fundamental technology for facilitating
system interoperability and information search, retrieval and extraction.
Structuring information in the area of nanomedicine is essential for current
research, so ontology design becomes a fundamental challenge for anchoring data
and knowledge representations. In this regard, two taxonomies or ontologies have
already been designed. These are the Nanomedicine Taxonomy (NT) (Gordon and
Sagman 2003 ) and the Nanoparticle Ontology (NPO) (Thomas et al. 2010 ). In addi-
tion, there are proposals to develop domain ontologies and taxonomies in the area
of cancer nanotechnology, with support from the NCI and other organizations. The
NCI White paper (Baker et al. 2009 ) described a set of initiatives, including a
ontology for discovery of new nanomaterials, a functional ontology, the Nanotech
Index Ontology, an atlas of nanotechnology or BiomedGT, among others.

4.2 Nanoparticle Characterization

Nanotechnology requires a lengthy development pipeline from nanomaterial synthesis
to physical characterization, to in vitro and in vivo experimentation, and to clinical
applications of all these materials. How to integrate all the information that will be
involved in this becomes a key challenge. Informatics methods and tools are neces-
sary to complement wet bench research, and involves much empirical heterogeneous
that must be collected and analyzed. As suggested by Fritts ( 2009 ), this should be one
of the central challenges for Nanoinformatics, suggesting that applying previous
results obtained in the area of BMI becomes a natural and most efficient option.

4.3 Data Integration and Exchange

Establishing an inventory of nanoresources will become a fundamental prerequisite
for accessing the different materials, software tools, databases, registries, etc. In
Nanomedicine, making this information easily accessible for biomedical profes-
sionals and practitioners will facilitate developing personalized therapies and
reducing potential nanotoxic side-effects.
The authors have been particularly focused on carrying out research on system
interoperability in BMI areas. These included syntactic and semantic-focused systems
which used ontologies as a conceptual reference to achieve database integration
(Alonso-Calvo et al. 2007 ). Over the next few years data integration might evolve
from its original clinical and/or genomic foci to address multilevel integration down
to the nano level. From a computational perspective, data integration at the nano
level poses even more difficult informational challenges that must be addressed—
parallel to those faced at higher scales by biomedical informatics. These include,
for instance, developing central repositories of nanoparticle-related information,