Advantages to Annotation with Ontolgies

The power of Phenote lies in its use of ontologies to represent concepts during data annotation.  Ontologies represent domains of knowledge by defining concepts or entities within a particular domain (and the terms used to refer to them) as well as how the entities are related to each other. An ontology thus provides a vocabulary for communicating knowledge about a topic, as well as a computable representation of the underlying reality.  Use of a well-structured, domain-expert-reviewed ontology for biological annotation allows the curated data to be understandable by both humans and computers, and thereby increasing the capacity for meaningful analysis.

 

Using ontologies during annotation has several advantages: