Ontologies

Evolutionary phenotypes will be described using the Entity-Quality system, which combines morphological terms from an anatomical ontology (here: the Teleost Anatomy Ontology, TAO) with quality terms from the Phenotype and Trait Ontology (PATO).

Phenotypes will be associated with taxa using a taxonomy ontology derived from the Catalog of Fishes, the Teleost Taxonomy Ontology (TTO).

We are in the process of developing a separate ontology of Taxonomic Ranks. These terms (e.g., family, genus, etc.) will then be removed from the TTO and links from taxonomic terms (property_value: has_rank) will be updated.

Although the anatomy as well as the taxonomy ontologies will keep changing to accommodate our curation needs, both have been admitted into the OBO CVS-based version-control system, from where the NCBO's BioPortal loads and updates ontologies on a regular basis. Both TAO and TTO can be browsed, searched, and visualized at the NCBO BioPortal.