Background Accounts of evidence are vital to evaluate and reproduce scientific
findings and integrate data on an informed basis. Currently, such accounts are
often inadequate, unstandardized and inaccessible for computational knowledge
engineering even though computational technologies, among them those of the
semantic web, are ever more employed to represent, disseminate and integrate
biomedical data and knowledge. Results We present SEE (Semantic EvidencE), an
RDF/OWL based approach for detailed representation of evidence in terms of the
argumentative structure of the supporting background for claims even in
complex settings. We derive design principles and identify minimal components
for the representation of evidence. We specify the Reasoning and Discourse
Ontology (RDO), an OWL representation of the model of scientific claims, their
subjects, their provenance and their argumentative relations underlying the
SEE approach. We demonstrate the application of SEE and illustrate its design
patterns in a case study by providing an expressive account of the evidence
for certain claims regarding the isolation of the enzyme glutamine synthetase.
Conclusions SEE is suited to provide coherent and computationally accessible
representations of evidence-related information such as the materials,
methods, assumptions, reasoning and information sources used to establish a
scientific finding by adopting a consistently claim-based perspective on
scientific results and their evidence. SEE allows for extensible evidence
representations, in which the level of detail can be adjusted and which can be
extended as needed. It supports representation of arbitrary many consecutive
layers of interpretation and attribution and different evaluations of the same
data. SEE and its underlying model could be a valuable component in a variety
of use cases that require careful representation or examination of evidence
for data presented on the semantic web or in other formats