Construction, Deployment, and Usage of the Human Reference Atlas Knowledge Graph

Abstract

Abstract The Human Reference Atlas (HRA) for the healthy, adult body is being developed by a team of international, interdisciplinary experts across 25+ consortia. It provides standard terminologies and data structures for describing specimens, biological structures, and spatial positions of experimental datasets and ontology-linked reference anatomical structures (ASs), cell types (CTs), and biomarkers (Bs). This paper introduces the HRA Knowledge Graph (KG) as central data resource for the HRA, supporting cross-scale, biological queries to Resource Description Framework graphs using SPARQL. In May 2025, the HRA KG v2.2 covers 71 organs with 5,800 ASs, 2,268 CTs, 2,531 Bs; it has 10,064,033 nodes, 171,250,177 edges, and a size of 125.84 GB. The HRA KG comprises 13 types of Digital Objects (DOs) using the Common Coordinate Framework Ontology to standardize core concepts and relationships across DOs. This work (1) provides data and code for HRA KG construction; (2) details HRA KG deployment as Linked Open Data; and (3) illustrates HRA KG usage via application programming interfaces, user interfaces, and data products. A companion website is at cns-iu.github.io/hra-kg-supporting-information .