The Vertebrate Taxonomy Ontology

January 25, 2014

Our paper describing the Vertebrate Taxonomy Ontology (VTO)  is published!  See: http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/4/1/34 .

One primary objective for Phenoscape and similar projects is to aggregate phenotypic data from multiple studies to named taxa, which in many phylogenetic studies are species but also might be at higher taxonomic levels such as genera or families. While there are many widely used taxonomies that include rich sampling of species and higher taxa, for example Bill Eschmeyer’s widely used Catalog of Fishes, there are few vetted “bridging” taxonomies that allow for aggregating data across, say, fishes, amphibians, and mammals. This problem becomes even more acute when you consider integrating data for extinct taxa as well. As a first step towards addressing this issue for vertebrates, we created the Vertebrate Taxonomy Ontology (VTO) that brings together taxonomies from NCBI, AmphibiaWeb, the Catalog of Fishes (via the previously existing Teleost Taxonomy Ontology), and the Paleobiology Database. The resulting curated taxonomy contains more than 106,000 terms, more than 104,000 additional synonyms, and extensive cross-referencing to these existing taxonomies. The Phenoscape Knowledgebase will leverage this taxonomic ontology by allowing for phenotype statistics to be displayed by taxon, including coarse measures of the extent of annotation coverage and phenotypic variation. Though phenotypes may be annotated to a species, the use of an ontological framework for the taxonomic hierarchy facilitates aggregating phenotypes to higher levels, such as genera or families. In the future, we hope to be able to integrate other excellent and rich sources of taxon-specific taxonomies, such as that in the Reptile Database or the International Ornithologists’ Union Bird List. This is a work-in-progress and the Phenoscape team is certainly interested to integrate new taxonomic sources as well as explore different ways that such a resource can be used and developed by the larger community.

 

Leave a Comment » | Taxonomy Ontology, Vertebrates | Permalink
Posted by davidcblackburn

Homology in anatomy ontologies: Report from a Phenotype RCN meeting

February 26, 2013

At the end of October 2012, the working groups of the Phenotype Research Coordination Network (RCN) all met at the Asilomar Conference Center, in Pacific Grove, CA. One of the groups, the Vertebrate working group, made it their goal to discuss methods of representing phylogenetic and serial homology in anatomy ontologies, an issue that is central to Phenoscape as well. Though common ancestry is implicit in the semantics of many classes and subclass relationships (see for example the ‘homology_notes’ for digit in Uberon), most multispecies anatomy ontologies, including Uberon, VSAO, and TAO, do not assert homology relationships between anatomical entities.  Nonetheless, homology is central to comparative biology, and therefore to enriching computations across data types, species, and evolutionary change.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by drycafe

Adding Amphibians to Phenoscape

March 7, 2012

On 15–16 February 2012, I visited NESCent to work with Peter Midford, Jim Balhoff, and, especially, Wasila Dahdul. The focus of my trip was to push forward on the continued development of the Amphibian Anatomical Ontology and the integration of phenotypic data for amphibians into the larger Phenoscape project.

With Peter Midford, I worked to make a significant update to the Amphibian Taxonomy Ontology based largely on a recent revision to the higher-level taxonomy used on AmphibiaWeb (for which I am part of the steering committee). AmphibiaWeb provides an excellent resource for Phenoscape and other related projects because it provides a list of currently recognized species of living amphibians and is updated daily.

The majority of my visit was spent working with Wasila Dahdul on issues related to the Amphibian Anatomy Ontology (AAO) and on curating our first evolutionary dataset related to the fin–limb transition (Ruta et al., 2003). During this work, we plowed through a significant portion of AAO terms lacking parent terms (either adding parents or synonymizing the terms with others in either VAO or AAO). We also evaluated whether to add terms to the AAO that are present in the Xenopus Anatomy Ontology (XAO; Xenopus is a genus of African frogs used as a model system) but absent in the AAO. In some cases, this led to recommending that those terms be removed from the XAO. As we have started to curate morphological characters related to the limbs from the study by Ruta et al. (2003), we encountered many terms not present in existing anatomy ontologies, such as AAO or the Vertebrate Anatomy Ontology. Some terms had been slated for inclusion in the Amniote Anatomy Ontology (AmAO) being developed by Nizar Ibrahim and Paul Sereno (University of Chicago). Because these terms are also present in non-amniotes, we are recommending that they be migrated from the AmAO to the higher-level VAO.

As we start to focus on curating phenotypes from the literature of vertebrate paleontology, a few issues are emerging. One important issue is that curation of data from paleontological studies will likely necessitate adding a field to our information for specimens to accommodate free text alongside museum abbreviations and catalog numbers. The reason for this is that paleontological studies can rely on a combination of materials, including both specimens and examination of literature. We will also need to add to and refine the collection of museum codes used to curate specimen data. These last points about accurately curating data related to specimens examined are important if we are to use the Phenoscape knowledgebase to point to records for those same specimens in on-line databases, or if databases (such as those for museum collections) want to point to records of specimens in the Phenoscape knowledgebase.

Leave a Comment » | Anatomy Ontology, Data Curation, Ontology, Training, Vertebrates | Permalink
Posted by davidcblackburn

My Experience as a Phenoscape Training Fellow

November 22, 2011

While working to describe two species of lizardfish (Synodus) with Carole Baldwin at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, she received an email from Paula Mabee asking if she knew or had any students interested in working on the Phenoscape Project. I had realized that with advances in technology and communication, evolutionary biology and all science was headed towards a future of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations to help address big questions and make tools and data readily available. Therefore, I immediately jumped on the opportunity to work on Phenoscape!

With the support of funding from DeepFin, I started my internship with Phenoscape at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in August 2011. My three months here at NESCent have flown by and even though it is my last day, I am just as excited about the project as the day I started! Working with Wasial Dahdul, Peter Midford and Jim Balhoff has enabled me to learn and understand a great deal about databases, collaboration and morphology. Phenoscape has completely changed the way I think about phenotypic characters. Breaking them down into logical statements in Phenex really allows you to understand a character as it fits in the bigger picture. I was able to work with Wasila in forging interdisciplinary ties by contributing to other ontologies and databases, such as PATO and PaleoDB. Additionally, working to assist in the expansion of Phenoscape to incorporate all vertebrates taught me a lot about the origins of vertebrates and the plethora of prehistoric life I did not realize existed- including my new personal favorite prehistoric fish, Jagorina!

NESCent is an amazing place. Being one of the few people here without a higher degree or a long list of publications under their belt, I was initially a little intimidated. However, the informatics group, post-docs and professors have been great and pushed me to participate in seminars and intellectual discussion. This is a stimulating environment that facilitates thinking outside the box and looking at bigger picture issues in evolutionary biology.

I am excited to continue my work on Phenoscape offsite back at the Smithsonian and I hope to contribute throughout my graduate career in Dr. Brian Sidlauskas’s (former NESCentian and Phenoscape tester and contributor) lab at Oregon State University.

Ben Frable
Graduate Student, Oregon State University
Student Researcher, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

1 Comment | Anatomy Ontology, Data Curation, Fossils, Morphology, Ontology, Training, Vertebrates | Permalink
Posted by bfrable

Phenotype RCN announced

November 24, 2010

NSF has recently funded a Research Coordination Network for researchers who are interested in searching and comparing phenotypes across species and in developing the tools and methods needed in making this possible  (http://phenotypercn.org).  The representation of morphology, behavior and other phenotypic features using computational methods such as ontologies and controlled vocabularies is in its infancy.  Integrating phenotypes with data across all levels of the biological hierarchy, however, is possible if standards are co-developed and coordinated.

This RCN envisions building a broad base of community knowledge and resources so as to maximize the research potential of web-based data.  Funding for participation in meetings, presentations and laboratory exchanges for students, postdocs and faculty from ontology and taxonomic domains (initially plants, arthropods, and vertebrates) is available through the RCN (see http://phenotypercn.org/opportunities/.

We are eager to have you join us!  Please sign up for our participant and mailing lists for further information (http://phenotypercn.org/participants/add/) and feel free to contact one of the PIs (Paula Mabee, pmabee@usd.edu; Andy Deans, andy_deans@ncsu.edu; Eva Huala, huala@acoma.stanford.edu; and Suzanna Lewis, selewis@lbl.gov).

Leave a Comment » | Ontology, Science, Training, Vertebrates, Workshops | Permalink
Posted by pmabee

Vertebrate skeletal anatomy workshop

May 4, 2010

Probably the most important branch of an anatomy ontology for vertebrates – at least from the standpoint of comparative morphologists, paleontologists, systematists – is the skeleton.  We invited a small group of bone and cartilage experts to come to a workshop at NESCent April 9-10, 2010, with the goal of reviewing, revising, and altogether enhancing the skeletal branch of the various vertebrate anatomy ontologies.  We had representation from the amphibian and teleost multispecies anatomy ontologies, the vertebrate model organism ontologies (zebrafish, Xenopus, mouse), and the cell ontology, as well as expert ontologists to advise on best representation (see our wiki page for their names and slides from their brief introductory presentations).  The workshop was productive beyond our expectations: we produced a ‘generic’ skeletal ontology that can be plugged into all vertebrate anatomy ontologies.  The files (including the useful cmap files) are under review by workshop participants at the moment, and we will be posting the outcome as a Vertebrate Skeletal Ontology in the obo foundry within the month.  Let us know if you want to review some giant spreadsheets of bone terms and relationships in the next few weeks….

Leave a Comment » | Anatomy Ontology, Morphology, Ontology, Vertebrates, Workshops | Permalink
Posted by pmabee