Use of Gene Ontology semantic information in protein interaction data visualization

The Gene Ontology project is an effort to structure knowledge on biological products and processes by adding semantic information to them. This is done in a systematic way so that this additional information can be automatically processed. In this contribution a protein-protein interaction visualization algorithm is proposed, which combines protein interaction data with Gene Ontology semantic information. The information is integrated using a semantic distance measure defined in ontologies or taxonomies. Multidimensional scaling is applied to this measure and the output complements protein interaction data in building an interaction visualization map.