Multiscale information modelling for heart morphogenesis

Science is made feasible by the adoption of common systems of units. As research has become more data intensive, especially in the biomedical domain, it requires the adoption of a common system of information models, to make explicit the relationship between one set of data and another, regardless of format. This is being realised through the OBO Foundry to develop a suite of reference ontologies, and NCBO Bioportal to provide services to integrate biomedical resources and functionality to visualise and create mappings between ontology terms. Biomedical experts tend to be focused at one level of spatial scale, be it biochemistry, cell biology, or anatomy. Likewise, the ontologies they use tend to be focused at a particular level of scale. There is increasing interest in a multiscale systems approach, which attempts to integrate between different levels of scale to gain understanding of emergent effects. This is a return to physiological medicine with a computational emphasis, exemplified by the worldwide Physiome initiative, and the European Union funded Network of Excellence in the Virtual Physiological Human. However, little work has been done on how information modelling itself may be tailored to a multiscale systems approach. We demonstrate how this can be done for the complex process of heart morphogenesis, which requires multiscale understanding in both time and spatial domains. Such an effort enables the integration of multiscale metrology.