Resources for Data Contributors

From phenoscape
Revision as of 23:38, 7 November 2007 by Hilmar (talk | contribs) (Annotating phenotypes)

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 taxonomy ontology is not yet available, but it will be generated from the Catalog of Fishes.

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:

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.
  • Launch Phenote using the webstart link. Alternatively, you can try the in-progress builds with the latest features, packaged for Mac OS X or Windows.
  • Choose the "phenomap" 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
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.

Ontology change requests

Here are links to ontology term trackers:

  • PATO tracker
  • Zebrafish anatomy - does anyone know if there is a term tracker?