Ontologies, controlled vocabularies with well-defined relations among terms, are a key tool in scientific data integration. By using ontologies, scientists from different disciplines can know when they are referring to the same entity by different names, and new discoveries are enabled by computer software being able to reason across disciplines and over large datasets. Already widely used in genomics, ontologies are of growing importance in systematics, ecology, behavior, genetics, morphology and physiology. This workshop aims to explore the utility of ontologies for ichthyology and herpetology, using the Teleost Anatomy Ontology and the Amphibian Anatomy Ontology as case studies of community resources that are being actively developed and used by members of ASIH. Participants will present examples of how these ontologies are being used to provide new ways of exploring data within morphological and phenotypic databases. Talks in the morning will be followed in the afternoon with ontology development workshops and hands-on demonstrations of Phenoscape and AmphibAnat tools.
DATE & TIME: Saturday, July 25, 2009
PLACE: Hilton Portland & Executive Tower
SPEAKERS:
- Hilmar Lapp, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center: A gentle introduction to ontologies for biology
- Monte Westerfield, Director, Zebrafish Information Network and Institute of Neuroscience, Eugene, OR: Linking animal models and human diseases
- Paula Mabee, University of South Dakota: Phenoscape: Using ontologies to link comparative morphology to genes
- Greg Riccardi, Florida State University: Why ontologies are important for understanding morphological images
- Peter Vize, University of Calgary: The Xenopus ontology and database
- Anne Maglia, Missouri University of Science and Technology: Development of an anatomical ontology for amphibians
- Marc Robinson-Rechavi, Universite de Lausanne, France: Integrating ontology and homology for the study of gene expression evolution
The workshop is jointly sponsored by the Phenoscape and AmphibAnat projects (Oganizers: Paula Mabee, Anne Maglia, Professor, Todd Vision and Monte Westerfield).
Phenoscape 