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

What are the developmental and genetic bases of evolutionary differences in morphology across species? Currently it is difficult to approach this question due to a lack of computational tools that allow researchers to integrate developmental genetic and comparative morphological/anatomical data. We are addressing this by developing a database of evolutionarily variable morphological characters for a large clade of fishes (the Ostariophysi) and connecting this database to the large collection of mutant phenotypes in the ZFIN database, the central database of the zebrafish model organism community. The evolutionary and mutant phenotypes are being described using common ontologies. The database with its web-interface, together with the extended ontologies and data curation tools, will allow researchers to ask novel questions about the genetic and developmental regulation of evolutionary morphological transitions. Tool and database development are being guided by use cases, or driving research questions, defined by the devo-evo community. These tools are being developed under an open-source, open-development model, and in such a way that they can be used for additional biological systems in the future. This project is a unique collaboration between evolutionary and model organism biologists including two national centers (NESCent and NCBO), the ZFIN model organism database, the Cypriniformes Tree of Life project, the DeepFin Research Coordination Network, and the morphological image databases used by the evolutionary biology community.

Paula Mabee, Monte Westerfield, Todd Vision, Hilmar Lapp, Wasila Dahdul, James Balhoff, Peter Midford

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