SLabsSearch™ Community Ontologies

SLabsSearch™ integrates scientific ontologies developed within the scientific community and adapts them for searching using Semantic Laboratories' search ontology OWL format.

One of the major sources for community ontologies relevant to the Life Sciences is the Open Biomedical Ontologies site maintained within the sourceforge.net open source repository.  OBO maintains over 50 distinct scientific ontologies with the overall goal of supporting the distribution of well-structured controlled vocabularies for shared use across different biological and medical domains. Some of these are listed below:

Arabidopsis Development Biological Imaging Methods Brenda tissue/enzyme source Chemical Entities of Biological Interest Cell Type Cereal Plant Trait C. elegans Development Cereal Plant Development Dictyostelim discodeum Anatomy Drosophila Development Drosophila Gross Anatomy Event (INOH) Evidence Codes Expressed Sequence Annotations Flybase Controlled Vocabulary Fungal Gross Anatomy Gene Ontology Human Development Anatomy Human Disease Maize Gross Anatomy Medaka Fish Anatomy & Development

Mammalian Phenotype Mouse Pathology Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Multiple Alignment Molecular Interaction Molecular Role Mosquito Gross Anatomy Mouse Adult Gross Anatomy Mouse Gross Anatomy Plant Environmental Conditions Physico-chemical Methods & Properties Protein Modifications Phenotype & Trait Phenotypic manifestation Plant Ontology PRIDE Controlled Vocabulary Mass Spectroscopy CV Pathway Ontology Physico-Chemical Process Sequence Types & Features Zebrafish Anatomy Development

In addition to OBO, a number of groups have published ontologies as part of their efforts to standardize vocabulary and domain concepts. These include:

• Unified Medical Language System developed by the National Library of Medicine

• The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)

• The National Cancer Institute Thesaurus

• The Systems Biology Ontology

• The Encyclopedia of Escherichia coli K-12 Genes and Metabolism (EcoCyc)

• The Reactome

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