Front end user interface tools

Phenex curation tool

Phenex is an application for annotating character matrix files with ontology terms to describe phenotypes and identify taxa. Phenex is a Java application based on code from the OBO-Edit and Phenote projects. While still under development, Phenex is ready for use and enables our ongoing data curation activities.

Data services built on OBD

We are adopting OBD as the ontology-driven datastore for our phenotype annotations. We are collaborating with the Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Projects group in driving future development of OBD. We are also developing a suite of web services on top of OBD to serve as a data access API and foundation for our user-oriented Phenoscape web application. These web services make use of the OBD Java API and present a RESTful service interface using Restlet.

Phenoscape web UI

The Phenoscape web application will allow scientists to browse and query the phenotype annotations as well as the supporting ontologies. Initially, the query capabilities will concentrate on implementing a select set of "use-cases", research questions that show the utility of the approach. Ultimately, we will build interfaces that allow researchers to ask open-ended questions of the data. The web application is being developed using Ruby on Rails and accesses phenotype data and ontology information via our OBD web services.