A Conceptual Model-Based Approach to Improve the Representation and Management of Omics Data in Precision Medicine

Abstract

Precision medicine has emerged as a disrupting medical model to transform a historically reactive medicine into a proactive one that focuses on delivering individualized treatment. A relevant challenge of precision medicine is to integrate the large amount of omics data that exists. This data has a high degree of heterogeneity, dispersion, and isolation. In addition, there is a lack of a solid ontological commitment regarding domain concepts and definitions, and a unified guideline of how to transform data into knowledge is missing. In this work, we report our experience applying conceptual modeling to deal with these challenges in a specific genomics dimension, i.e., Precision Medicine. To do so, we have applied conceptual modeling techniques. The use of these techniques allows us to create representations of the world (i.e., conceptual schemes) that can be used for the purposes of understanding, communicating, and problemsolving. They also help to establish a common ontological framework to facilitate both communication and knowledge evolution in complex domains. We identify a set of limitations that emerged after working in a precision medicine context, and we describe how we have solved them using conceptual modeling. Thus, the main contribution of this work is to present the subsequent Conceptual Schema that allowed us to overcome these limitations, which provides a better representation of proteomics data and eases its integration.