Archived Post

From frank.nicholassydney.edu.au  Tue Feb  5 09:12:12 2013
From: Frank Nicholas <frank.nicholassydney.edu.au>
Postmaster: processed by the Listmaster
To: Multiple Recipients of <omia-supportanimalgenome.org>
Subject: ontologies for OMIA
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:12:12 -0600

Colleagues,

                Thank you very much for joining the OMIA support Group.

                I thought I would start with the issue of ontologies,
which, among other things, are an invaluable means to increase our ability
to relate information from different sources that use different terminology
to describe the same trait or disorder.

                A key person in the recent development of ontology tools is
Chris Mungall, previously in Edinburgh (where he worked partly on ArkDB),
and now in the Genomics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(http://berkeleybop.org/...person/chris-mungall). Another key person is
Zhiliang Hu, who is working with NAGRP colleagues to develop useful
ontologies for animal production traits in the context of Animal QTLdb (see
http://www.animalgenome.org/...ioinfo/projects/ato/).

                Chris Mungall has kindly offered to provide some guidance
on initiating the development of one or more OMIA ontologies that would
provide a systematic way for classifying disorders and other traits in OMIA
and for relating them to other relevant resources such as similar
catalogues for humans, mice and rats, and Animal QTLdb.

                Is there anyone in the Support Group, or do you know of
anyone, who may have the time and capacity to work on this, in
collaboration with Zhiliang (and with some input from Chris)? To the extent
that there are many disorders in OMIA, a reasonable knowledge of clinical
terminology would be a great help. Whoever takes on this task would
inevitably become involved in renaming/combining/splitting OMIA entries.

                Regards
                Frank