After three years of hard work, we are happy to announce the first specification for Process Diagrams of the Systems Biology Graphical Notation!

The goal of the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) is to standardize the graphical/visual representation of essential biochemical and cellular processes studied in Systems Biology. SBGN defines a comprehensive though limited set of symbols with precise semantics, together with detailed syntactic rules defining their use. It also describes the manner in which such graphical information should be interpreted.

Standardizing graphical notations for describing biological interactions is an important step towards the efficient and accurate transmission of biological knowledge between different communities. Traditionally, diagrams representing interactions among genes and molecules have been drawn in an informal manner, using simple unconstrained shapes and edges such as arrows. Until the development of SBGN, no standard agreed-upon convention existed defining exactly how to draw such diagrams in a way that helps readers interpret them consistently, correctly, and unambiguously. By standardizing the visual notation, SBGN can serve as a bridge between different communities such as computational and experimental biologists, and even more broadly in education, publishing, and more.

SBGN is formed of three languages offering different views of a biological system. The present specification defines the Level 1 of the Process Diagram notation, aimed to describe the causal sequences of molecular processes and their results. It is the result of numerous discussions and exchanges, between many individual and groups, and is very much a community work. The result should hopefully suits the result of most users while being unambiguous.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

More information on SBGN and SBGN Process Diagram Level 1 can be found at http://www.sbgn.org and through the mailing-list sbgn-discuss[at]sbgn.org