California Dreaming

March 27, 2013

Winner of a competition among participants to illustrate the essence of Phenoscape, from Paul Sereno

It’s easy to get caught up in the details when developing infrastructure. You know it will be useful – because the grant application said so!  But there’s so much engineering to do. And no matter how thoughtful and deliberate a process you follow to anticipate the needs of your future users, once they have a complicated thing in their hands who knows how they will actually use it.

Enter the Phenoscape Knowledgebase.  After a heroic data collection push this winter, our next release of the Knowledgebase will contain millions of evolutionary phenotypes from throughout the vertebrates, linked to genetic phenotypes from human, mouse, Xenopus, and zebrafish, and a particularly rich set of annotations for skeletal features of fins and limbs.  The Knowledgebase is far from comprehensive, and annotations do not capture the full richness of the original characters in the evolutionary literature, but we think it’s a pretty useful resource.

So, it’s time to see what capabilities our users are excited by and what limitations frustrate them. To that end, we brought a small group of experts who look at phenotypes in a variety of different ways (e.g. genetics, systematics, evo-devo, clinical biomedicine, paleontology, even zooarchaeology) to the California Academy of Sciences in February, and we asked them what questions they’d most like to address using the KB as it exists today.

To help us in tapping into the assembled brainpower, we enlisted KnowInnovation, facilitation pioneers that specialize in helping researchers self-organize into teams to tackle creative research challenges. This they did with amazing resourcefulness, milking ideas out of us that we wouldn’t have imagined we even had.  The workshop was no ordinary parade of PowerPoints. We did speed-dating to toss research ideas off of each other, generated a  staggering number of post-it notes, sculpted creatures and skeletal parts out of clay and engaged in a host of other seemingly contrived but strangely liberating activities.  We watched in amazement as Karl Gude took visual minutes.

clay1postitsspeed_dating2karl

And we came up with some great collaborative ideas for research that take leverage the Knowledgebase to ask questions that would have been difficult to impossible to answer without it, including questions about genetic convergence and parallelism, global comparisons of intra and interspecific phenotypic variation, and the evolution of phenotypes affected by duplicated genes. These projects will now serve as driving applications for Phenoscape so that we know better what our users really need the Knowledgebase to do for them.  We look forward to reporting on the outcome of those in due course.

A big thank you to David Blackburn and the Cal Academy for providing such an inspiring venue, being exquisite hosts, and for conveniently having an open museum night during our workshop.  Thanks also to a great group of participants and facilitators, and to to NSF for a supplemental award that helped to make the workshop a success.

Leave a Comment » | Evolution, Knowledge Base, Outreach, Science, Workshops | Permalink
Posted by tjvision

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 »

Leave a Comment » | Anatomy Ontology, Homology, Ontology, Vertebrates, Workshops | Permalink
Posted by drycafe

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting 2012 (Raleigh, NC)

November 27, 2012

The Phenoscape project had a strong presence at the largest Vertebrate Paleontology/Comparative Anatomy conference in the world this year, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting. In one of the large conference halls, and in front of a packed audience, I gave a talk on the history, goals and background of the Phenoscape project (“Phenoscape: A New Anatomical Ontology of Vertebrates”). The authorship also included Paul  Sereno, Paula Mabee, Todd Vision and Hilmar Lapp. The talk was well received, and several attendees expressed great interest in our work. The difficult part now is to make sure this first spark of interest is maintained – this can be difficult when the community has not been exposed to ontologies before and the project appears to be so different from anything they have done before – but we’ll do our best to stay in contact with those people that expressed strong interest.

Alex Dececchi presented a poster on Phenoscape at the same conference (Phenoscape: bridging the gap between fossils and genes – his co-authors were J. Balhoff, W. Dahdul, N. Ibrahim, H. Lapp, P. Midford, P. Sereno, T. Vision, M. Westerfield, P Mabee and D. Blackburn), making sure that even those that could not attend the talk would get an opportunity to learn more about our exciting work.

Nizar Ibrahim, University of Chicago

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Posted by carcharodontosaurus

Phenex 1.6 released

October 10, 2012

Phenex 1.6 has been released. Updates:

  • Support for entry of polymorphic values in matrix cells (documentation).
  • Improvements to the tab-delimited export format.

Download for Mac, Windows, or Unix.

Leave a Comment » | Data Curation, Phenex | Permalink
Posted by Jim

Knowledgebase tutorial now available

October 4, 2012

The Phenoscape team has created a tutorial introduction to the Knowledgebase. The tutorial is designed to introduce users to exploring phenotypic data in the Phenoscape Knowledgebase, starting with searching for anatomical terms, browsing data using faceted browsing, and performing searches using the query panel. Let us know if you find it helpful in getting started with the KB.

Link: Phenoscape Knowledgebase tutorial

1 Comment | Knowledge Base, Training | Permalink
Posted by Jim

Junior Biocurator

September 11, 2012

This summer, with the help of non-profit organization Project Exploration (http://www.projectexploration.org/), we ran the Junior Biocurator program for the first time. This is the ‘outreach’ part of the Phenoscape project. The program content and structure was designed by Paul Sereno, Lauren Conroy, Nicole Ridgwell and myself. The program includes several lectures, covering topics as diverse as biocuration, comparative anatomy and photography techniques. Lectures were given by Lauren Conroy, Erin Fitzgerald, Nicole Ridgwell and myself. Nicole also supervised the day to day activities and labs. In their ‘hands on’ time the students acquired a whole array of impressive new skills, outlined below.

I was a little worried that the Jr Biocurators would find the curriculum to be too demanding and difficult, but the five students – Haley, Kyle, Hope, Michael and Kamal – really enjoyed their time and impressed everybody with their curiosity, enthusiasm and overall performance in the many exercises and other tasks they had to complete. The students learned how to put together vertebrate skeletons, how to organize biological information in an ontology, and how to take high quality photographs of vertebrate bones. They also learned how to manipulate these images in Photoshop, effectively creating publication quality image files. As if that was not enough, towards the end of the program, they learned how to use a laser scanner and visualized the bones in a whole new way. The images they created (photography and scanning) will be used by us – first in Protege and ultimately in the Phenoscape user interface. Our Jr Biocurators were extremely proud when they heard that their work would make a real, tangible contribution to a major NSF funded project.

While we were putting together the curriculum, I suggested we also offer the students opportunities to learn more about university life in general. Nicole took them to the University of Chicago admissions office, were they could ask all their questions, and they also went on a big campus tour and visited the Oriental Institute Museum (which is part of our university). This part of the curriculum was also extremely well received.

Running the program was a lot of work, but it was all worth it, considering that our Jr Biocurators all became good friends (and good young budding scientists!) and were genuinely sad when the program ended. I am looking forward to meeting the next Jr Biocurators in 2013 and am no longer worried about the degree of difficulty of the curriculum.

To find out more about the program and read some of the blog posts our Biocurators wrote visit:

http://www.projectexploration.org/blog/2012/07/18/two-day/

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151007328856583.416729.91282556582&type=3

http://www.projectexploration.org/blog/2012/08/01/university-tour/

Nizar Ibrahim,

University of Chicago

Leave a Comment » | Outreach, Training | Permalink
Posted by carcharodontosaurus

DILS 2012

August 28, 2012

In June I had the opportunity to attend DILS 2012 (Data Integration in the Life Sciences), at the University of Maryland in College Park. I presented a poster on Phenoscape, “The Phenoscape Knowledgebase: Integrating phenotypic data across taxonomy, from biodiversity to developmental genetics”. The poster highlighted some of the new directions the Phenoscape project is heading, such as broadening taxonomic coverage and adoption of semantic web technologies. DILS was a small conference but had several talks discussing the applications of ontologies to biological data. I’m looking forward to DILS 2013 in Montreal, in conjunction with ICBO and the Canadian Semantic Web conference.

1 Comment | Conferences, Informatics | Permalink
Posted by Jim

Phenex 1.4.2 released

August 16, 2012

A new bugfix release of Phenex is available. Phenex 1.4.2 addresses the following issues:

Download: http://phenoscape.org/wiki/Phenex#Direct_downloads_for_Phenex_1.4.2

Leave a Comment » | Data Curation, Phenex | Permalink
Posted by Jim

Call for Participants: Workshop on New Tools for Studying Phenotype Evolution in the Vertebrates

July 23, 2012

What new research opportunities are opened up by the power to compute over phenotype information from thousands of species of vertebrates, particularly when that information is combined with phenotype and expression information for thousands of genes in multiple model organisms? The Phenoscape project invites you to be among the pioneers in opening up this research.

The first release of the Phenoscape Knowledgebase includes over 500K species phenotypes linked to 4,000+ genes from zebrafish, and is currently being extended to capture phenotype data from other vertebrates and linked to phenotype and expression data for other model organisms (including mouse and Xenopus).

We are looking for participants for a small, 3-day workshop, February 8-10 (to be held at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco) who are interested in engaging in creative problem-solving directed at this outstanding problem and initiating collaborations. The outcome is expected to be several collaborative projects whose goals would drive the development of the Phenoscape tool set/interface and would present new and creative ways to deepen understanding of phenotypic evolution. Phenoscape aims to support the initial steps in these activities. We are particularly interested in a broad approach to this problem and welcome interest from scientists with backgrounds in computational and systems biology, mathematics, development, genomics, and evolution.

If you are interested, please contact Paula Mabee or Todd Vision.

1 Comment | Evolution, Knowledge Base, Science, Workshops | Permalink
Posted by pmabee

Phenoscape goes mobile

July 9, 2012

Previous layout of the KB faceted browsing page on the iPhone. Text is tiny and must be zoomed and panned.

The NESCent Informatics group periodically holds “hack days”, one day mini-hackathons where we take a break from our usual schedule and push forward on a specific topic of interest. Most recently, the topic was support for the mobile web. I took a look at the Phenoscape Knowledgebase layout on the iPad and iPhone. In general the site did not adapt well to small screen sizes.

In order to avoid serving different layouts to specific devices, I applied techniques from the Responsive Web Design approach, which uses new functionality from CSS 3 to dynamically adjust the page layout based on the size of the browser window. In the new layout, when the window is small, controls move from the side to the top, allowing both the controls and the content table to use the full screen width.

Using responsive web design, the controls and content become stacked on small screens.

The new layout works across most of the pages on the Knowledgebase site. In general, it is a big improvement on mobile devices. However, there are a few remaining glitches to address, such as controls that appear upon mouse hover: difficult to use on a touchscreen device, where there is no mouse.

Leave a Comment » | Knowledge Base, Software | Permalink
Posted by Jim

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