BION2SEL: An Ontology-based Approach for the Selection of Molecular Biology Databases Daniel Lichtnow 1 , Ronnie Alves 2,5,6 , Oscar Pastor 3 , Ver´ onica Burriel 3 , and Jos´ e Palazzo Moreira de Oliveira 4 1 Universidade Federal de Santa Maria - UFSM, Santa Maria, RS, Brazil dlichtnow@politecnico.ufsm.br 2 Institut de Biologie Computationnelle, Montpellier, France alvesrco@gmail.com 3 Universitat Polit` ecnica de Val` encia, Valencia, Spain vburriel@pros.upv.es, opastor@pros.upv.es 4 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS, RS, Porto Alegre, Brazil palazzo@inf.ufrgs.br 5 Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Micro´ electronique de Montpellier, UMR 5506, Universit´ e Montpellier 2, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Montpellier, France 6 PPGCC - Universidade Federal do Par´ a, Bel´ em, Brazil Abstract. The catalogs of molecular biology databases does not pro- vide a full description of databases, so the user should select databases using limited information available. Taking into account this fact, in the context of a initiative is called BioDBCore, a group of experts proposes core metadata definitions to describe the molecular biology databases. However, how to use these metadata to infer the quality of a database is a clear open issue. In the present work, we propose an ontology-based approach aiming to guide the database selection process from molecular biology database catalogs using these metadata. Keywords: molecular biology databases, database catalog, data quality, ontology, database selection 1 Introduction There have been some initiatives to create online molecular biology database collections. Currently the database selection processes from these catalogs is an iterative process, where the users must evaluate manually a set of candidate databases using limited query mechanisms and incomplete information about databases. In the present work, we propose an ontology-based approach to the selection of database catalogs. We start showing examples of molecular biology database catalogs (Section 2). After, an overall perspective of an approach that can help a user in the selection process is presented (Section 3). A preliminary version of the proposed ontology and its data quality rules are presented (Section 4) and an application scenario illustrating the use of the ontology is discussed (Section 5). Final remarks and future works concludes this paper (Section 6).