TY - JOUR
T1 - The Porifera Ontology (PORO)
T2 - Enhancing sponge systematics with an anatomy ontology
AU - Thacker, Robert W.
AU - Díaz, Maria C.
AU - Kerner, Adeline
AU - Vignes-Lebbe, Régine
AU - Segerdell, Erik
AU - Haendel, Melissa A.
AU - Mungall, Christopher J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Thacker et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
PY - 2014/9/8
Y1 - 2014/9/8
N2 - Background: Porifera (sponges) are ancient basal metazoans that lack organs. They provide insight into key evolutionary transitions, such as the emergence of multicellularity and the nervous system. In addition, their ability to synthesize unusual compounds offers potential biotechnical applications. However, much of the knowledge of these organisms has not previously been codified in a machine-readable way using modern web standards. Results: The Porifera Ontology is intended as a standardized coding system for sponge anatomical features currently used in systematics. The ontology is available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro.owl, or from the project homepage http://porifera-ontology.googlecode.com/. The version referred to in this manuscript is permanently available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro/releases/2014-03-06/.Conclusions: By standardizing character representations, we hope to facilitate more rapid description and identification of sponge taxa, to allow integration with other evolutionary database systems, and to perform character mapping across the major clades of sponges to better understand the evolution of morphological features. Future applications of the ontology will focus on creating (1) ontology-based species descriptions; (2) taxonomic keys that use the nested terms of the ontology to more quickly facilitate species identifications; and (3) methods to map anatomical characters onto molecular phylogenies of sponges. In addition to modern taxa, the ontology is being extended to include features of fossil taxa.
AB - Background: Porifera (sponges) are ancient basal metazoans that lack organs. They provide insight into key evolutionary transitions, such as the emergence of multicellularity and the nervous system. In addition, their ability to synthesize unusual compounds offers potential biotechnical applications. However, much of the knowledge of these organisms has not previously been codified in a machine-readable way using modern web standards. Results: The Porifera Ontology is intended as a standardized coding system for sponge anatomical features currently used in systematics. The ontology is available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro.owl, or from the project homepage http://porifera-ontology.googlecode.com/. The version referred to in this manuscript is permanently available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro/releases/2014-03-06/.Conclusions: By standardizing character representations, we hope to facilitate more rapid description and identification of sponge taxa, to allow integration with other evolutionary database systems, and to perform character mapping across the major clades of sponges to better understand the evolution of morphological features. Future applications of the ontology will focus on creating (1) ontology-based species descriptions; (2) taxonomic keys that use the nested terms of the ontology to more quickly facilitate species identifications; and (3) methods to map anatomical characters onto molecular phylogenies of sponges. In addition to modern taxa, the ontology is being extended to include features of fossil taxa.
KW - Evolution
KW - Morphology
KW - Phylogenetics
KW - Taxonomic identification
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U2 - 10.1186/2041-1480-5-39
DO - 10.1186/2041-1480-5-39
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84927940765
SN - 2041-1480
VL - 5
JO - Journal of Biomedical Semantics
JF - Journal of Biomedical Semantics
IS - 1
M1 - 39
ER -