Ontologies provide a common platform of controlled vocabulary for researchers who need to share information across a particular domain, inclusive of machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. The need for ontologies that provide a systematic arrangement of available data and allow cross talk across various related domains is gaining momentum. In this backdrop, we have developed a comprehensive ontology on primary and established cell lines-both normal and pathologic. It covers around 400 cell lines. This ontology has been built to include the major domains in the field of biology like anatomy, bio-molecules, chemicals and drugs, pathological conditions and genetic variations around the cell lines. An extensive network of relations has been built across these concepts to enable different combination of queries. The ontology covers all cell lines from major sources like ATCC, DSMZ, ECACC, ICLC etc. and is built in OWL format.

Usha Mahadevan

The NCBO Resource Web service is a system for ontology based annotation and indexing of biomedical data; the key functionality of this system is to enable users to locate biomedical data resources related to particular ontology concepts. The annotations are generated using the NCBO Annotator and presented through integration with BioPortal, enabling researchers to search for biomedical resources associated (annotated) with specific ontology terms. The NCBO Resources web service uses a concept recognizer (currently provided by the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics, University of Michigan) to produce a set of annotations and expand these using ontology is_a relations in the ontology. The system's indexing workflow processes the text metadata of diverse resource elements such as gene expression data sets, descriptions of radiology images, clinical trial reports, and PubMed article abstracts to annotate and index them with concepts from appropriate ontologies. Researchers can then search biomedical data sources using ontology concepts.

NCBO

High level abstraction API (Java/REST/R) for interacting with ontology resources including local ontology files in standard OWL and OBO formats (via OWL API) and public ontology repositories: EBI Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) and NCBO BioPortal.

Tomasz Adamusiak, Helen Parkinson, Natalja Kurbatova, Misha Kapushesky, Morris Swertz

OntoMaton is a google spreadsheet application allowing for ontology search and tagging directly within google spreadsheets. More information can be found here: https://github.com/ISA-tools/OntoMaton

ISA team

A Web service that tags free text with ontology concepts. NCBO uses these Web services to annotate resources in the NCBO Resource Index to create an ontology index of these resources. This Web service can be accessed through BioPortal or used directly in your software. Currently, the annotation workflow is based on syntactic concept recognition (using concept names and synonyms) and on a set of semantic expansion algorithms that leverage the semantics in ontologies (e.g., is_a relations). Our service methodology leverages ontologies to create annotations of raw text and returns them using semantic web standards.

NCBO