A Semantic Model of Genetic Evidence

A conceptual framework for representing scientific and genetic evidence from the biomedical literature in a form suitable for variant interpretation, automated reasoning, and AI-ready clinical infrastructure.

This repository accompanies a manuscript in preparation: an extended version to be deposited on arXiv and a condensed version intended for journal submission.

What this repository contains

.
├── paper/          LaTeX source for the manuscript (main.tex, references.bib)
├── schema/         SHACL shapes + supporting definitions
├── annotations/    One YAML file per annotated publication + raw PDF extractions
├── case-reports/   Per-paper case reports (one for each of the six annotations)
├── protocols/      Annotation protocol documents (canonical rules + per-mode workflows)
├── skills/         Two Claude skills (annotation, review) that operationalise the protocols
├── extraction/     Scripts that extract highlights and callouts from annotated PDFs
├── figures/        Source files for figures used in the paper
└── .github/        CI configuration validating annotations against the schema

The annotation corpus

Six publications, chosen to span the major epistemic shapes of genetic evidence encountered in literature-based variant interpretation:

The four manual annotations live at the top of annotations/. The two AI-drafted annotations are versioned: annotations/v0/ holds the original protocol-v0 drafts (curator-reviewed), and annotations/v1/ holds their re-annotation under the current protocol. The paper documents Duerr v0 and Inouye v1 (the protocol matured on the Duerr review and was then applied to Inouye); the other version of each is retained for comparison.

For manually annotated papers, PDF highlights and sticky-note callouts are the authoritative ground truth. The YAML is a structured transformation of those artifacts, with every assertion carrying a source_span pointing back to the specific page and quoted passage. Disagreements between the annotator and the AI reviewer are not silently resolved: they are captured as reviewer_query, reviewer_suggestion, or reviewer_disagreement fields so they remain auditable.

For AI-drafted annotations, the same source_span anchoring is used, and curator review is the evaluation signal.

Per-paper case reports are in case-reports/. Each report summarizes the paper's role in the corpus, the decomposition into GeneticEvidence items, the candidate extensions surfaced, the reviewer flags, and notes for downstream consumers.

Annotation protocols

The protocols/ directory documents how annotations are produced, separately from what they describe (the schema) and what they contain (the corpus). The intent is that an annotation under this schema is reproducible and citable under a versioned protocol, not an artifact of a particular annotator's unwritten conventions.

• protocols/PROTOCOL.md: the canonical, mode-agnostic rules. Covers decomposition principles (the lumper default), dimension assignment, source-anchoring requirements, flag taxonomy, candidate-extension promotion, normalization handling. Current version: 1.0.
• protocols/PROTOCOL_AUTONOMOUS.md: the operational workflow for autonomous AI annotation (single pass, no curator in the loop). Specifies input quality gating, self-consistency checks, mandatory confidence-summary emission, and failure handling.
• protocols/REVIEW_PROTOCOL.md and protocols/REVIEW_PROTOCOL_INTERACTIVE.md: the assertion-by-assertion review protocol and its interactive, curator-in-the-loop variant, used to adjudicate the AI-drafted annotations. Current version: 1.0.
• protocols/LABELING_EXAMPLES.md: worked cases for the recurring judgment calls referenced by the protocols above.

A staged interactive annotation protocol (curator review of the decomposition before dimension filling) is planned but not yet specified.

The two AI-drafted annotations in the corpus (Duerr 2006, Inouye 2018) were produced under what became PROTOCOL_AUTONOMOUS.md v1.0; their provenance blocks record the protocol version retroactively.

Skills

Two Claude skills in skills/ operationalise the protocols:

• genetic-evidence-annotation/ — autonomous drafting of a YAML annotation for a paper (the autonomous protocol). Triggers on requests like "annotate this paper under the genetic-evidence model" or "produce a GEM YAML annotation for paper X".
• genetic-evidence-review/ — interactive, curator-in-the-loop review of an existing annotation (the review protocol). Triggers on "review this GEM annotation", "audit this annotation against the paper", and similar; it emits a review log, a review report, and the updated annotation.

Both follow the Agent Skills open standard and are portable across agents that support it (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and others), not Claude-specific. Each skill references shared material outside its own folder, the protocols in protocols/, the schema in schema/, and exemplar annotations in annotations/, so it has to be installed together with that material.

Installing in Claude Code (or another in-repo agent)

Run the agent inside a checkout of this repository and copy or symlink the skill folder into your skills directory (project-local .claude/skills/ or user-global ~/.claude/skills/), for example:

ln -s "$PWD/skills/genetic-evidence-annotation" .claude/skills/
ln -s "$PWD/skills/genetic-evidence-review"     .claude/skills/

The skills' repo-relative references (protocols/..., schema/..., annotations/...) resolve because the agent runs at the repository root.

Installing on Claude.ai (web / mobile / desktop)

Do not zip the skills/<name>/ folder directly: the skill depends on files outside that folder (protocols, schema, exemplars) that a bare zip would miss. Instead build a self-contained bundle with the provided script:

./build_skill_bundle.sh --skill annotation   # -> genetic-evidence-annotation-skill.zip
./build_skill_bundle.sh --skill review        # -> genetic-evidence-review-skill.zip
# add --check for an input-validation dry run

The script gathers SKILL.md, the relevant protocols, the schema, and (for the annotation skill) the four curator-led exemplar annotations into one zip, rewriting the paths for the flat bundle layout. Upload the resulting zip via Customize > Skills > + Create skill (the bundle's top-level folder must be the root of the zip, which the script ensures).

Using the skills

Once installed, ask in natural language, for example:

Annotate papers/smith2024.pdf under the genetic-evidence model.

Review the GEM annotation in annotations/smith2024.yaml against the paper.

The annotation skill confirms the input paper, output path, and schema location, then produces a single YAML file matching the existing annotations. The review skill walks the annotation item by item with the curator and emits its three artifacts (review log, review report, and the updated annotation).

Extraction pipeline

The scripts in extraction/ read a PDF with highlights and callouts and emit a structured JSON record of every annotation, including the text covered by each highlight (extracted via coordinate lookup) and the free-text notes attached to callouts.

python3 extraction/extract_annotations.py paper.pdf out.json

Two extractors are provided. extract_annotations.py uses PyMuPDF and is the recommended one: it reliably recovers the text under each highlight. extract_annotations_pypdf.py uses pypdf and is provided as a fallback.

Dependencies:

pip install pymupdf pypdf pyyaml

Schema

Two complementary representations:

• schema/genetic_evidence.shacl.ttl: SHACL shapes encoding the class hierarchy, dimension types, cardinalities, and conditional activation rules. This is the machine-checkable validation layer.
• schema/dimensions.md: the human-readable enumeration reference for all categorical value types (knowledge domain, method, target type, etc.).
• schema/EXTENSIONS.md: the authoritative log of all candidate extensions surfaced during corpus annotation, including their promotion or retraction status.

Annotations in annotations/ are validated by the CI workflow in .github/workflows/validate.yml, which runs on every push and pull request and blocks merges on failure:

• parse-yaml — every annotation YAML parses cleanly.
• shacl-validate — scripts/validate_annotations.py converts each annotation to RDF (extraction/yaml_to_rdf.py) and runs pyshacl against schema/genetic_evidence.shacl.ttl. The shapes enforce the always-required dimensions, the value enumerations, the implemented conditional-activation rules (variant ascertainment, mode of inheritance, organism), and a mandatory source_span on every assertion; an annotation that violates any of these is rejected. Remaining conditional-presence and reviewer-flag shapes are open work (see schema/examples.md).
• coverage — scripts/compute_coverage.py regenerates the dimension-coverage table from the YAML annotations (the source of the paper's Supplementary Note SN7 and annotations/coverage.md).

Run the same checks locally with python3 scripts/validate_annotations.py and python3 scripts/compute_coverage.py (requires pyshacl rdflib pyyaml).

Citing this work

See CITATION.cff. A DOI is minted via the Zenodo–GitHub integration at each tagged release (record metadata in .zenodo.json); the concept DOI will be added to CITATION.cff after the first release.

License

Content (annotations, documentation, the paper sources) is licensed CC-BY-4.0 (LICENSE.txt). Code — src/, scripts/, and the extraction tooling — is licensed Apache-2.0 (LICENSE-code.txt).

Contact

See the corresponding-author block on the paper's title page.