This article is part of the supplement: Proceedings of Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences (OBML 2011)
Proceedings
Towards improving phenotype representation in OWL
1 Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
2 Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EH, UK
3 Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE), University of Leipzig, 04107 Leipzig, Germany
Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2012, 3(Suppl 2):S5 doi:10.1186/2041-1480-3-S2-S5
Published: 21 September 2012Abstract
Background
Phenotype ontologies are used in species-specific databases for the annotation of mutagenesis experiments and to characterize human diseases. The Entity-Quality (EQ) formalism is a means to describe complex phenotypes based on one or more affected entities and a quality. EQ-based definitions have been developed for many phenotype ontologies, including the Human and Mammalian Phenotype ontologies.
Methods
We analyze formalizations of complex phenotype descriptions in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that are based on the EQ model, identify several representational challenges and analyze potential solutions to address these challenges.
Results
In particular, we suggest a novel, role-based approach to represent relational qualities such as concentration of iron in spleen, discuss its ontological foundation in the General Formal Ontology (GFO) and evaluate its representation in OWL and the benefits it can bring to the representation of phenotype annotations.
Conclusion
Our analysis of OWL-based representations of phenotypes can contribute to improving consistency and expressiveness of formal phenotype descriptions.
