ABSTRACT
Fragmentation of knowledge is peculiarity of virology and is due to the great diversity of virus entities: experts working on the influenza virus have very little interaction with those specialists in herpes viruses. Knowledge supports are traditionally encyclopedic books, publications, and websites often centered on one or a few viruses. Yet, associating a precise vocabulary with data is an essential step in digitizing and exploiting knowledge because it allows fixing concepts that are sometimes named too loosely. Overall, a global effort has been done in ViralZone to gather, share, and perpetuate general knowledge in virus molecular biology. Actually, many knowledge in virology comes from prediction, relying on similarity or models. Within a virus family, few strains are studied in laboratory and knowledge about other viruses is inferred by similarity. In bioinformatics, representation of knowledge relies on controlled vocabulary or ontologies, which is a concrete form of a conceptualization of a community's knowledge of a domain.
