Searching as well as visualizing the Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO) on the NCBO Bioportal was broken for more than a week but has been fixed since Friday.
The other good update from the Bioportal development is that terms can now be found by their synonyms as well. For example, try searching TAO for the ‘dermosphenotic’, which at present isn’t the name of a term in the ontology. Instead, you get the ‘infraorbital 5‘, for which dermosphenotic is a synonym.
Fish morphologists will note that this is actually problematic, since in reality the dermosphenotic is the synonym for the last infraorbital bone. In zebrafish, with which we seeded the TAO, this is indeed the 5th in the series of infraorbitals, but in other clades of teleosts it is the 6th or yet another one. But that’s another story, which we’ll highlight in a forthcoming post on building the TAO.