[...] However, while large amounts of data can be gathered and queried in this manner, the syntactic integration process is limited to resolving formatting differences without attempting to address semantic heterogeneity. While existing syntactic tools for model annotation are suitable for many tasks, semantic data integration methods can resolve differences in the meaning of the data and theoretically provide a more useful level of integration. A number of semantic integration approaches have been applied to many different research areas [6, Section 9], and are beginning to be used in the life sciences (see also Sections 1.6 and 1.5). [...] - Allyson Lister