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1.
Sci Data ; 11(1): 363, 2024 Apr 11.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38605048

ABSTRACT

Translational research requires data at multiple scales of biological organization. Advancements in sequencing and multi-omics technologies have increased the availability of these data, but researchers face significant integration challenges. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are used to model complex phenomena, and methods exist to construct them automatically. However, tackling complex biomedical integration problems requires flexibility in the way knowledge is modeled. Moreover, existing KG construction methods provide robust tooling at the cost of fixed or limited choices among knowledge representation models. PheKnowLator (Phenotype Knowledge Translator) is a semantic ecosystem for automating the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) construction of ontologically grounded KGs with fully customizable knowledge representation. The ecosystem includes KG construction resources (e.g., data preparation APIs), analysis tools (e.g., SPARQL endpoint resources and abstraction algorithms), and benchmarks (e.g., prebuilt KGs). We evaluated the ecosystem by systematically comparing it to existing open-source KG construction methods and by analyzing its computational performance when used to construct 12 different large-scale KGs. With flexible knowledge representation, PheKnowLator enables fully customizable KGs without compromising performance or usability.


Subject(s)
Biological Science Disciplines , Knowledge Bases , Pattern Recognition, Automated , Algorithms , Translational Research, Biomedical
2.
Bioinformatics ; 40(3)2024 Mar 04.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38383067

ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION: Creating knowledge bases and ontologies is a time consuming task that relies on manual curation. AI/NLP approaches can assist expert curators in populating these knowledge bases, but current approaches rely on extensive training data, and are not able to populate arbitrarily complex nested knowledge schemas. RESULTS: Here we present Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES), a Knowledge Extraction approach that relies on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot learning and general-purpose query answering from flexible prompts and return information conforming to a specified schema. Given a detailed, user-defined knowledge schema and an input text, SPIRES recursively performs prompt interrogation against an LLM to obtain a set of responses matching the provided schema. SPIRES uses existing ontologies and vocabularies to provide identifiers for matched elements. We present examples of applying SPIRES in different domains, including extraction of food recipes, multi-species cellular signaling pathways, disease treatments, multi-step drug mechanisms, and chemical to disease relationships. Current SPIRES accuracy is comparable to the mid-range of existing Relation Extraction methods, but greatly surpasses an LLM's native capability of grounding entities with unique identifiers. SPIRES has the advantage of easy customization, flexibility, and, crucially, the ability to perform new tasks in the absence of any new training data. This method supports a general strategy of leveraging the language interpreting capabilities of LLMs to assemble knowledge bases, assisting manual knowledge curation and acquisition while supporting validation with publicly-available databases and ontologies external to the LLM. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: SPIRES is available as part of the open source OntoGPT package: https://github.com/monarch-initiative/ontogpt.


Subject(s)
Knowledge Bases , Semantics , Databases, Factual
3.
Nucleic Acids Res ; 52(D1): D1333-D1346, 2024 Jan 05.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37953324

ABSTRACT

The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a widely used resource that comprehensively organizes and defines the phenotypic features of human disease, enabling computational inference and supporting genomic and phenotypic analyses through semantic similarity and machine learning algorithms. The HPO has widespread applications in clinical diagnostics and translational research, including genomic diagnostics, gene-disease discovery, and cohort analytics. In recent years, groups around the world have developed translations of the HPO from English to other languages, and the HPO browser has been internationalized, allowing users to view HPO term labels and in many cases synonyms and definitions in ten languages in addition to English. Since our last report, a total of 2239 new HPO terms and 49235 new HPO annotations were developed, many in collaboration with external groups in the fields of psychiatry, arthrogryposis, immunology and cardiology. The Medical Action Ontology (MAxO) is a new effort to model treatments and other measures taken for clinical management. Finally, the HPO consortium is contributing to efforts to integrate the HPO and the GA4GH Phenopacket Schema into electronic health records (EHRs) with the goal of more standardized and computable integration of rare disease data in EHRs.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Humans , Phenotype , Genomics , Algorithms , Rare Diseases
4.
Nucleic Acids Res ; 52(D1): D938-D949, 2024 Jan 05.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38000386

ABSTRACT

Bridging the gap between genetic variations, environmental determinants, and phenotypic outcomes is critical for supporting clinical diagnosis and understanding mechanisms of diseases. It requires integrating open data at a global scale. The Monarch Initiative advances these goals by developing open ontologies, semantic data models, and knowledge graphs for translational research. The Monarch App is an integrated platform combining data about genes, phenotypes, and diseases across species. Monarch's APIs enable access to carefully curated datasets and advanced analysis tools that support the understanding and diagnosis of disease for diverse applications such as variant prioritization, deep phenotyping, and patient profile-matching. We have migrated our system into a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure; simplified Monarch's data ingestion and knowledge graph integration systems; enhanced data mapping and integration standards; and developed a new user interface with novel search and graph navigation features. Furthermore, we advanced Monarch's analytic tools by developing a customized plugin for OpenAI's ChatGPT to increase the reliability of its responses about phenotypic data, allowing us to interrogate the knowledge in the Monarch graph using state-of-the-art Large Language Models. The resources of the Monarch Initiative can be found at monarchinitiative.org and its corresponding code repository at github.com/monarch-initiative/monarch-app.


Subject(s)
Databases, Factual , Disease , Genes , Phenotype , Humans , Internet , Databases, Factual/standards , Software , Genes/genetics , Disease/genetics
5.
Med ; 4(12): 913-927.e3, 2023 Dec 08.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37963467

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Navigating the clinical literature to determine the optimal clinical management for rare diseases presents significant challenges. We introduce the Medical Action Ontology (MAxO), an ontology specifically designed to organize medical procedures, therapies, and interventions. METHODS: MAxO incorporates logical structures that link MAxO terms to numerous other ontologies within the OBO Foundry. Term development involves a blend of manual and semi-automated processes. Additionally, we have generated annotations detailing diagnostic modalities for specific phenotypic abnormalities defined by the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO). We introduce a web application, POET, that facilitates MAxO annotations for specific medical actions for diseases using the Mondo Disease Ontology. FINDINGS: MAxO encompasses 1,757 terms spanning a wide range of biomedical domains, from human anatomy and investigations to the chemical and protein entities involved in biological processes. These terms annotate phenotypic features associated with specific disease (using HPO and Mondo). Presently, there are over 16,000 MAxO diagnostic annotations that target HPO terms. Through POET, we have created 413 MAxO annotations specifying treatments for 189 rare diseases. CONCLUSIONS: MAxO offers a computational representation of treatments and other actions taken for the clinical management of patients. Its development is closely coupled to Mondo and HPO, broadening the scope of our computational modeling of diseases and phenotypic features. We invite the community to contribute disease annotations using POET (https://poet.jax.org/). MAxO is available under the open-source CC-BY 4.0 license (https://github.com/monarch-initiative/MAxO). FUNDING: NHGRI 1U24HG011449-01A1 and NHGRI 5RM1HG010860-04.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Humans , Rare Diseases , Software , Computer Simulation
6.
medRxiv ; 2023 Jul 13.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37503136

ABSTRACT

Navigating the vast landscape of clinical literature to find optimal treatments and management strategies can be a challenging task, especially for rare diseases. To address this task, we introduce the Medical Action Ontology (MAxO), the first ontology specifically designed to organize medical procedures, therapies, and interventions in a structured way. Currently, MAxO contains 1757 medical action terms added through a combination of manual and semi-automated processes. MAxO was developed with logical structures that make it compatible with several other ontologies within the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. These cover a wide range of biomedical domains, from human anatomy and investigations to the chemical and protein entities involved in biological processes. We have created a database of over 16000 annotations that describe diagnostic modalities for specific phenotypic abnormalities as defined by the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO). Additionally, 413 annotations are provided for medical actions for 189 rare diseases. We have developed a web application called POET (https://poet.jax.org/) for the community to use to contribute MAxO annotations. MAxO provides a computational representation of treatments and other actions taken for the clinical management of patients. The development of MAxO is closely coupled to the Mondo Disease Ontology (Mondo) and the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) and expands the scope of our computational modeling of diseases and phenotypic features to include diagnostics and therapeutic actions. MAxO is available under the open-source CC-BY 4.0 license (https://github.com/monarch-initiative/MAxO).

7.
Bioinformatics ; 39(7)2023 07 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37389415

ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION: Knowledge graphs (KGs) are a powerful approach for integrating heterogeneous data and making inferences in biology and many other domains, but a coherent solution for constructing, exchanging, and facilitating the downstream use of KGs is lacking. RESULTS: Here we present KG-Hub, a platform that enables standardized construction, exchange, and reuse of KGs. Features include a simple, modular extract-transform-load pattern for producing graphs compliant with Biolink Model (a high-level data model for standardizing biological data), easy integration of any OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) ontology, cached downloads of upstream data sources, versioned and automatically updated builds with stable URLs, web-browsable storage of KG artifacts on cloud infrastructure, and easy reuse of transformed subgraphs across projects. Current KG-Hub projects span use cases including COVID-19 research, drug repurposing, microbial-environmental interactions, and rare disease research. KG-Hub is equipped with tooling to easily analyze and manipulate KGs. KG-Hub is also tightly integrated with graph machine learning (ML) tools which allow automated graph ML, including node embeddings and training of models for link prediction and node classification. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: https://kghub.org.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , COVID-19 , Humans , Pattern Recognition, Automated , Rare Diseases , Machine Learning
8.
NPJ Digit Med ; 6(1): 89, 2023 May 19.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37208468

ABSTRACT

Common data models solve many challenges of standardizing electronic health record (EHR) data but are unable to semantically integrate all of the resources needed for deep phenotyping. Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies provide computable representations of biological knowledge and enable the integration of heterogeneous data. However, mapping EHR data to OBO ontologies requires significant manual curation and domain expertise. We introduce OMOP2OBO, an algorithm for mapping Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to OBO ontologies. Using OMOP2OBO, we produced mappings for 92,367 conditions, 8611 drug ingredients, and 10,673 measurement results, which covered 68-99% of concepts used in clinical practice when examined across 24 hospitals. When used to phenotype rare disease patients, the mappings helped systematically identify undiagnosed patients who might benefit from genetic testing. By aligning OMOP vocabularies to OBO ontologies our algorithm presents new opportunities to advance EHR-based deep phenotyping.

9.
Mamm Genome ; 34(3): 364-378, 2023 09.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37076585

ABSTRACT

Existing phenotype ontologies were originally developed to represent phenotypes that manifest as a character state in relation to a wild-type or other reference. However, these do not include the phenotypic trait or attribute categories required for the annotation of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mappings or any population-focussed measurable trait data. The integration of trait and biological attribute information with an ever increasing body of chemical, environmental and biological data greatly facilitates computational analyses and it is also highly relevant to biomedical and clinical applications. The Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) is a formalised, species-independent collection of interoperable phenotypic trait categories that is intended to fulfil a data integration role. OBA is a standardised representational framework for observable attributes that are characteristics of biological entities, organisms, or parts of organisms. OBA has a modular design which provides several benefits for users and data integrators, including an automated and meaningful classification of trait terms computed on the basis of logical inferences drawn from domain-specific ontologies for cells, anatomical and other relevant entities. The logical axioms in OBA also provide a previously missing bridge that can computationally link Mendelian phenotypes with GWAS and quantitative traits. The term components in OBA provide semantic links and enable knowledge and data integration across specialised research community boundaries, thereby breaking silos.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Biological Science Disciplines , Genome-Wide Association Study , Phenotype
10.
Syst Biol ; 72(5): 1084-1100, 2023 11 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37094905

ABSTRACT

The spectacular radiation of insects has produced a stunning diversity of phenotypes. During the past 250 years, research on insect systematics has generated hundreds of terms for naming and comparing them. In its current form, this terminological diversity is presented in natural language and lacks formalization, which prohibits computer-assisted comparison using semantic web technologies. Here we propose a Model for Describing Cuticular Anatomical Structures (MoDCAS) which incorporates structural properties and positional relationships for standardized, consistent, and reproducible descriptions of arthropod phenotypes. We applied the MoDCAS framework in creating the ontology for the Anatomy of the Insect Skeleto-Muscular system (AISM). The AISM is the first general insect ontology that aims to cover all taxa by providing generalized, fully logical, and queryable, definitions for each term. It was built using the Ontology Development Kit (ODK), which maximizes interoperability with Uberon (Uberon multispecies anatomy ontology) and other basic ontologies, enhancing the integration of insect anatomy into the broader biological sciences. A template system for adding new terms, extending, and linking the AISM to additional anatomical, phenotypic, genetic, and chemical ontologies is also introduced. The AISM is proposed as the backbone for taxon-specific insect ontologies and has potential applications spanning systematic biology and biodiversity informatics, allowing users to: 1) use controlled vocabularies and create semiautomated computer-parsable insect morphological descriptions; 2) integrate insect morphology into broader fields of research, including ontology-informed phylogenetic methods, logical homology hypothesis testing, evo-devo studies, and genotype to phenotype mapping; and 3) automate the extraction of morphological data from the literature, enabling the generation of large-scale phenomic data, by facilitating the production and testing of informatic tools able to extract, link, annotate, and process morphological data. This descriptive model and its ontological applications will allow for clear and semantically interoperable integration of arthropod phenotypes in biodiversity studies.


Subject(s)
Arthropods , Animals , Phylogeny , Insecta , Informatics , Biodiversity
12.
Front Physiol ; 14: 1076533, 2023.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36776967

ABSTRACT

As a model organism, Drosophila is uniquely placed to contribute to our understanding of how brains control complex behavior. Not only does it have complex adaptive behaviors, but also a uniquely powerful genetic toolkit, increasingly complete dense connectomic maps of the central nervous system and a rapidly growing set of transcriptomic profiles of cell types. But this also poses a challenge: Given the massive amounts of available data, how are researchers to Find, Access, Integrate and Reuse (FAIR) relevant data in order to develop an integrated anatomical and molecular picture of circuits, inform hypothesis generation, and find reagents for experiments to test these hypotheses? The Virtual Fly Brain (virtualflybrain.org) web application & API provide a solution to this problem, using FAIR principles to integrate 3D images of neurons and brain regions, connectomics, transcriptomics and reagent expression data covering the whole CNS in both larva and adult. Users can search for neurons, neuroanatomy and reagents by name, location, or connectivity, via text search, clicking on 3D images, search-by-image, and queries by type (e.g., dopaminergic neuron) or properties (e.g., synaptic input in the antennal lobe). Returned results include cross-registered 3D images that can be explored in linked 2D and 3D browsers or downloaded under open licenses, and extensive descriptions of cell types and regions curated from the literature. These solutions are potentially extensible to cover similar atlasing and data integration challenges in vertebrates.

13.
bioRxiv ; 2023 Jan 27.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36747660

ABSTRACT

Existing phenotype ontologies were originally developed to represent phenotypes that manifest as a character state in relation to a wild-type or other reference. However, these do not include the phenotypic trait or attribute categories required for the annotation of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mappings or any population-focused measurable trait data. Moreover, variations in gene expression in response to environmental disturbances even without any genetic alterations can also be associated with particular biological attributes. The integration of trait and biological attribute information with an ever increasing body of chemical, environmental and biological data greatly facilitates computational analyses and it is also highly relevant to biomedical and clinical applications. The Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) is a formalised, species-independent collection of interoperable phenotypic trait categories that is intended to fulfil a data integration role. OBA is a standardised representational framework for observable attributes that are characteristics of biological entities, organisms, or parts of organisms. OBA has a modular design which provides several benefits for users and data integrators, including an automated and meaningful classification of trait terms computed on the basis of logical inferences drawn from domain-specific ontologies for cells, anatomical and other relevant entities. The logical axioms in OBA also provide a previously missing bridge that can computationally link Mendelian phenotypes with GWAS and quantitative traits. The term components in OBA provide semantic links and enable knowledge and data integration across specialised research community boundaries, thereby breaking silos.

14.
J Biomed Semantics ; 14(1): 3, 2023 02 24.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36823605

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Evaluating the impact of environmental exposures on organism health is a key goal of modern biomedicine and is critically important in an age of greater pollution and chemicals in our environment. Environmental health utilizes many different research methods and generates a variety of data types. However, to date, no comprehensive database represents the full spectrum of environmental health data. Due to a lack of interoperability between databases, tools for integrating these resources are needed. In this manuscript we present the Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology (ECTO), a species-agnostic ontology focused on exposure events that occur as a result of natural and experimental processes, such as diet, work, or research activities. ECTO is intended for use in harmonizing environmental health data resources to support cross-study integration and inference for mechanism discovery. METHODS AND FINDINGS: ECTO is an ontology designed for describing organismal exposures such as toxicological research, environmental variables, dietary features, and patient-reported data from surveys. ECTO utilizes the base model established within the Exposure Ontology (ExO). ECTO is developed using a combination of manual curation and Dead Simple OWL Design Patterns (DOSDP), and contains over 2700 environmental exposure terms, and incorporates chemical and environmental ontologies. ECTO is an Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontology that is designed for interoperability, reuse, and axiomatization with other ontologies. ECTO terms have been utilized in axioms within the Mondo Disease Ontology to represent diseases caused or influenced by environmental factors, as well as for survey encoding for the Personalized Environment and Genes Study (PEGS). CONCLUSIONS: We constructed ECTO to meet Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry principles to increase translation opportunities between environmental health and other areas of biology. ECTO has a growing community of contributors consisting of toxicologists, public health epidemiologists, and health care providers to provide the necessary expertise for areas that have been identified previously as gaps.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Humans , Databases, Factual
15.
Sci Data ; 10(1): 50, 2023 01 24.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36693887

ABSTRACT

Large-scale single-cell 'omics profiling is being used to define a complete catalogue of brain cell types, something that traditional methods struggle with due to the diversity and complexity of the brain. But this poses a problem: How do we organise such a catalogue - providing a standard way to refer to the cell types discovered, linking their classification and properties to supporting data? Cell ontologies provide a partial solution to these problems, but no existing ontology schemas support the definition of cell types by direct reference to supporting data, classification of cell types using classifications derived directly from data, or links from cell types to marker sets along with confidence scores. Here we describe a generally applicable schema that solves these problems and its application in a semi-automated pipeline to build a data-linked extension to the Cell Ontology representing cell types in the Primary Motor Cortex of humans, mice and marmosets. The methods and resulting ontology are designed to be scalable and applicable to similar whole-brain atlases currently in preparation.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Brain , Animals , Humans , Mice , Callithrix , Data Collection/standards
16.
Bioinformatics ; 39(1)2023 01 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36511598

ABSTRACT

MOTIVATION: Since early 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has confronted the biomedical community with an unprecedented challenge. The rapid spread of COVID-19 and ease of transmission seen worldwide is due to increased population flow and international trade. Front-line medical care, treatment research and vaccine development also require rapid and informative interpretation of the literature and COVID-19 data produced around the world, with 177 500 papers published between January 2020 and November 2021, i.e. almost 8500 papers per month. To extract knowledge and enable interoperability across resources, we developed the COVID-19 Vocabulary (COVoc), an application ontology related to the research on this pandemic. The main objective of COVoc development was to enable seamless navigation from biomedical literature to core databases and tools of ELIXIR, a European-wide intergovernmental organization for life sciences. RESULTS: This collaborative work provided data integration into SIB Literature services, an application ontology (COVoc) and a triage service named COVTriage and based on annotation processing to search for COVID-related information across pre-defined aspects with daily updates. Thanks to its interoperability potential, COVoc lends itself to wider applications, hopefully through further connections with other novel COVID-19 ontologies as has been established with Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The data at https://github.com/EBISPOT/covoc and the service at https://candy.hesge.ch/COVTriage.


Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , COVID-19/diagnosis , Triage , Commerce , Internationality
17.
Sci Data ; 9(1): 714, 2022 11 19.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36402838

ABSTRACT

The standardized identification of biomedical entities is a cornerstone of interoperability, reuse, and data integration in the life sciences. Several registries have been developed to catalog resources maintaining identifiers for biomedical entities such as small molecules, proteins, cell lines, and clinical trials. However, existing registries have struggled to provide sufficient coverage and metadata standards that meet the evolving needs of modern life sciences researchers. Here, we introduce the Bioregistry, an integrative, open, community-driven metaregistry that synthesizes and substantially expands upon 23 existing registries. The Bioregistry addresses the need for a sustainable registry by leveraging public infrastructure and automation, and employing a progressive governance model centered around open code and open data to foster community contribution. The Bioregistry can be used to support the standardized annotation of data, models, ontologies, and scientific literature, thereby promoting their interoperability and reuse. The Bioregistry can be accessed through https://bioregistry.io and its source code and data are available under the MIT and CC0 Licenses at https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry .

18.
Database (Oxford) ; 20222022 10 08.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36208225

ABSTRACT

Similar to managing software packages, managing the ontology life cycle involves multiple complex workflows such as preparing releases, continuous quality control checking and dependency management. To manage these processes, a diverse set of tools is required, from command-line utilities to powerful ontology-engineering environmentsr. Particularly in the biomedical domain, which has developed a set of highly diverse yet inter-dependent ontologies, standardizing release practices and metadata and establishing shared quality standards are crucial to enable interoperability. The Ontology Development Kit (ODK) provides a set of standardized, customizable and automatically executable workflows, and packages all required tooling in a single Docker image. In this paper, we provide an overview of how the ODK works, show how it is used in practice and describe how we envision it driving standardization efforts in our community. Database URL: https://github.com/INCATools/ontology-development-kit.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Databases, Factual , Metadata , Quality Control , Software , Workflow
19.
Database (Oxford) ; 20222022 05 25.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-35616100

ABSTRACT

Despite progress in the development of standards for describing and exchanging scientific information, the lack of easy-to-use standards for mapping between different representations of the same or similar objects in different databases poses a major impediment to data integration and interoperability. Mappings often lack the metadata needed to be correctly interpreted and applied. For example, are two terms equivalent or merely related? Are they narrow or broad matches? Or are they associated in some other way? Such relationships between the mapped terms are often not documented, which leads to incorrect assumptions and makes them hard to use in scenarios that require a high degree of precision (such as diagnostics or risk prediction). Furthermore, the lack of descriptions of how mappings were done makes it hard to combine and reconcile mappings, particularly curated and automated ones. We have developed the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) which addresses these problems by: (i) Introducing a machine-readable and extensible vocabulary to describe metadata that makes imprecision, inaccuracy and incompleteness in mappings explicit. (ii) Defining an easy-to-use simple table-based format that can be integrated into existing data science pipelines without the need to parse or query ontologies, and that integrates seamlessly with Linked Data principles. (iii) Implementing open and community-driven collaborative workflows that are designed to evolve the standard continuously to address changing requirements and mapping practices. (iv) Providing reference tools and software libraries for working with the standard. In this paper, we present the SSSOM standard, describe several use cases in detail and survey some of the existing work on standardizing the exchange of mappings, with the goal of making mappings Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The SSSOM specification can be found at http://w3id.org/sssom/spec. Database URL: http://w3id.org/sssom/spec.


Subject(s)
Metadata , Semantic Web , Data Management , Databases, Factual , Workflow
20.
BMC Bioinformatics ; 23(1): 99, 2022 Mar 22.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-35317743

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Ontologies of precisely defined, controlled vocabularies are essential to curate the results of biological experiments such that the data are machine searchable, can be computationally analyzed, and are interoperable across the biomedical research continuum. There is also an increasing need for methods to interrelate phenotypic data easily and accurately from experiments in animal models with human development and disease. RESULTS: Here we present the Xenopus phenotype ontology (XPO) to annotate phenotypic data from experiments in Xenopus, one of the major vertebrate model organisms used to study gene function in development and disease. The XPO implements design patterns from the Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno), and the principles outlined by the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO Foundry) to maximize interoperability with other species and facilitate ongoing ontology management. Constructed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) the XPO combines the existing uPheno library of ontology design patterns with additional terms from the Xenopus Anatomy Ontology (XAO), the Phenotype and Trait Ontology (PATO) and the Gene Ontology (GO). The integration of these different ontologies into the XPO enables rich phenotypic curation, whilst the uPheno bridging axioms allows phenotypic data from Xenopus experiments to be related to phenotype data from other model organisms and human disease. Moreover, the simple post-composed uPheno design patterns facilitate ongoing XPO development as the generation of new terms and classes of terms can be substantially automated. CONCLUSIONS: The XPO serves as an example of current best practices to help overcome many of the inherent challenges in harmonizing phenotype data between different species. The XPO currently consists of approximately 22,000 terms and is being used to curate phenotypes by Xenbase, the Xenopus Model Organism Knowledgebase, forming a standardized corpus of genotype-phenotype data that can be directly related to other uPheno compliant resources.


Subject(s)
Biological Ontologies , Animals , Gene Ontology , Humans , Phenotype , Xenopus laevis
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