Evolutionary characters, phenotypes and ontologies: curating data from the systematic biology literature.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The wealth of phenotypic descriptions documented in the published articles, monographs, and dissertations of phylogenetic systematics is traditionally reported in a free-text format, and it is therefore largely inaccessible for linkage to biological databases for genetics, development, and phenotypes, and difficult to manage for large-scale integrative work. The Phenoscape project aims to represent these complex and detailed descriptions with rich and formal semantics that are amenable to computation and integration with phenotype data from other fields of biology. This entails reconceptualizing the traditional free-text characters into the computable Entity-Quality (EQ) formalism using ontologies.

Methodology/principal findings

We used ontologies and the EQ forma

SUBMITTER: Dahdul WM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2873956 | biostudies-literature | 2010 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature