Matching arthropod anatomy ontologies to the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology: results from a manual alignment

M A Bertone,M J Yoder,A R Deans,J P Balhoff,K C Seltmann,I Miko

doi:10.1093/database/bas057

Abstract

Matching is an important step for increasing interoperability between heterogeneous ontologies. Here, we present alignments we produced as domain experts, using a manual mapping process, between the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology and other existing arthropod anatomy ontologies (representing spiders, ticks, mosquitoes and Drosophila melanogaster). The resulting alignments contain from 43 to 368 mappings (correspondences), all derived from domain-expert input. Despite the many pairwise correspondences, only 11 correspondences were found in common between all ontologies, suggesting either major intrinsic differences between each ontology or gaps in representing each group’s anatomy. Furthermore, we compare our findings with putative correspondences from Bioportal (derived from LOOM software) and summarize the results in a total evidence alignment. We briefly discuss characteristics of the ontologies and issues with the matching process.Database URL: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hao/2012-07-18/arthropod-mappings.obo

Highlights

Representing information about a domain of interest as an ontology is an increasingly important way to formalize concepts and aid computer reasoning of real-world systems
The following numbers of correspondences were found between each ontology and the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology (HAO) (Table 2 and Figure 1): 43 (SPD), 82 (TADS), 307 (TGMA) and 368 (FBbt)
A list of all correspondences can be found in the alignment file: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hao/2012-07-18/arthro pod-mappings.obo

Summary

Introduction

Representing information about a domain of interest as an ontology is an increasingly important way to formalize concepts and aid computer reasoning of real-world systems. Five arthropod taxa have representative anatomy ontologies on the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry [1]: spiders [Arachnida: Araneae; SPD; [2]], ticks [Arachnida: Ixodida; TADS; [3]], mosquitoes [Insecta: Diptera: Culicidae; TGMA; [3]], Drosophila melanogaster [Insecta: Diptera: Drosophilidae; FBbt; [4]] and wasps and their relatives [Insecta: Hymenoptera; HAO; [5]]. These ontologies range in size from 552 (SPD) to 6884 (FBbt) valid classes (at the time of analysis; Table 1) and differ in general content, structure and granularity.

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