With the help of Phenoscape and DeepFin intern Ben Frable, I recently finished adding 117 French anatomical terms and synonyms from Chanet & Desoutter’s glossary publication [1] to the Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO). These authors spent many years defining and translating Paul Chabanaud’s anatomical analyses of flatfishes into modern French and English to help researchers understand his important publications. Adding these terms to the TAO takes their translation one step further, enabling computers to link Chabanaud’s unusual terms to an ontology ID for each anatomical ‘concept’, which in turn enables connections among all phenotypic and related data that reference this ID.
These synonyms can now be used in searches of the Phenoscape Knowledgebase. For example, you can see the French synonyms for ‘paired fin’. One can imagine ultimately being able to select a preferred language or term label when browsing the ontology in the Knowledgebase.
These were the first set of foreign terms to be added to the teleost ontology, and we had to tweak the Phenoscape Knowledgebase interface to display the diacritical marks correctly. We are ready to accept more! Please send me anything you’d like added or changed to the TAO term tracker.
[1] Chanet, B., & Desoutter-Meniger, M. (2008). French-English glossary of terms found in Chabanaud’s published works on Pleuronectiformes. Cybium, Electronic Publication no 1:1-23. PDF download
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