Resources for Data Contributors

From phenoscape
Revision as of 17:35, 16 June 2008 by Wasila (talk | contribs) (Curatorial Best Practices)

Viewing ontologies

On the web

Many ontologies are available for browsing at the NCBO BioPortal. For example:

Click the "Visualize" button on the ontology's homepage to browse it graphically.

Other ontologies:

The teleost taxonomy and anatomy ontologies is now available:

On your desktop

You can download the ontologies as OBO files from the above web sites. You can download and install OBO-Edit to view in a desktop application.

Annotating phenotypes

Phenote

Phenote is used by ZFIN and FlyBase for mutant phenotype annotation. We are developing enhancements to the Phenote EQ Editor for PhenoScape data curation. Some of the PhenoScape-specific enhancements include:

For more information please see the Phenote User Guide.

Installation and start up

  • You need Java 1.5 or newer to run Phenote. For the Mac this requires Mac OS X 10.4 or newer.
  • Though you can launch Phenote using the webstart link, we recommend installing the latest in-progress build, packaged for Mac OS X or Windows. These builds will have the latest features. Please see the Phenote User Guide for details.
  • Choose the "phenoscape" configuration before beginning.
  • So far most curators are using the Excel-compatible tab-delimited format for saving files.

Usage

The following table describes the entry fields in the PhenoScape configuration. Phenote does not force you to fill in them all, but see the table for when to use each field.

Field Usage
Publication the publication describing the character state
CrossRef has a free-text query form for looking up DOIs
Taxon Genus & species
Catalog Number museum lot ID
Specimen Count number of specimens from lot examined
Preparation type of specimen preparation (skeleton, cleared & stained, etc.)
Entity term from anatomy ontology (currently using zebrafish)
Quality term from PATO - should be "value" term, unless you are filling in an absolute measurement (e.g. "length")
Additional Entity term from anatomy ontology - only use if the Quality term descends from "relational quality of continuant"
Measurement absolute measurement - useful as value for terms such as "length"
Unit unit of measurement, if Numerical Value is filled in
Compare To a taxon to which this phenotype is in comparison to (optional)
Textual Description textual description of character state in publication
Image URI web link to an image, if available

Please report any issues you come across by using the Phenote tracker.

Term post-composition and pre-coordination

Terms can be post-composed at the time of annotation rather than pre-composed (also known as pre-coordinated) within the ontology. Post-composed terms are created in Phenote and follow genus-differentia definitions. Unlike pre-composed terms, do not have an ID.

Post-composition

Example 1: ‘branched dorsal fin ray’

E= TAO: dorsal fin lepidotrichium^has_quality(PATO:branched)

Example 2: ‘supraorbital ventral projection’

bony projection^part_of [(ventral region)^part_of (supraorbital bone)]

Ea= TAO: bony projection

Eb= BSPO: ventral region part_of TAO: supraorbital bone


Post-composition in Phenote is enabled using the ‘comp’ button next to the Entity field. In example 1, the genus term is ‘dorsal fin lepidotrichium’ and the differentia term is ‘branched.’ The term in example 2 requires nesting because term Eb is a post-composed term (it is not an ‘additional entity’).

Pre-composition

The above term would be pre-coordinated using OBO-edit as:

TAO: supraorbital ventral projection

intersection of TAO: bony projection

intersection of TAO: ventral region of suprorbital

TAO: ventral region of suprorbital

intersection of BSPO: ventral region

intersection of TAO: suprorbital

Known Issues:

The post-compose feature in Phenote allows addition of multiple differentia that apply to the initial genus term but nesting of terms is not yet enabled. In the meantime, when post-composed terms that require nesting are needed for annotation, we will note in the 'curator notes' field that these terms will need proper updating once nesting is possible.

Curatorial Best Practices

Guide to Character Annotation

Creating Taxon Lists

Ontology change requests

Here are links to ontology term trackers: