We have been developing mockup versions of new web interfaces for the Phenoscape Knowledgebase. In order to design an updated interface which is both more powerful and easier to use than the existing one, in February I presented a series of mockups to faculty, post-docs, and graduate students at the University of Oregon, the home of ZFIN. Following user-testing expertise at ZFIN, I met with the researchers in pairs and recorded their feedback on newly designed interfaces for viewing anatomical and taxonomic terms within the ontology hierarchy, configurable queries for phenotype annotations, and data visualization on phylogenetic trees. The feedback proved to be extremely valuable and has led to several modifications to the planned interface revisions.
Revising the Knowledgebase interface
March 24, 2010
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Development, Knowledge Base, Software | 
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Posted by Jim
Taxonomy as ontology: opening up the debate
May 15, 2008We have created a new mailing list, obo-taxonomy, under the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) umbrella. Our motivation for this new forum is to really open up the discussion surrounding the issues of what should be a proper ontological representation of taxonomy and phylogeny, for example proper semantics of the relationship between taxonomic groups, and between specimens and species. If you care about or have thoughts or opinions on these and related questions, we encourage you to subscribe to this new list.
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Posted by Hilmar
Phenoscape project set up on SourceForge
April 29, 2008We finally set up a Phenoscape project on SourceForge.net. At this moment there isn’t much there in the code repository, but within the next days we’ll deposit some scripts that we had to develop for OBO-format ontology generation (for example, for initiating the TTO from the Catalog of Fishes) and for massaging the tracker messages auto-generated by the OBO term request trackers to be more user-friendly. The source code repository will also be the home for some controlled vocabularies that (only?) we need for our project (such as the one for museum codes).
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Posted by Hilmar
