Integrating phenotype ontologies across multiple species

Phenotype ontologies are typically constructed to serve the needs of a particular community, such as annotation of genotype-phenotype associations in mouse or human. Here we demonstrate how these ontologies can be improved through assignment of logical definitions using a core ontology of phenotypic qualities and multiple additional ontologies from the Open Biological Ontologies library. We also show how these logical definitions can be used for data integration when combined with a unified multi-species anatomy ontology. in an high-throughput systematic aimed at elucidating the molecular basis of human disease. Accurate, precise, and comparable phenotypic information is critical for gaining an in-depth understanding of the relationship between diseases and genes, as well as shedding light upon the influence of different environments on individual genotypes. Natural language free-text descriptions allow for maximum expressivity, but the results are difficult to compute over. Structured controlled vocabularies and ontologies provide an alternative means of recording phenotypes in a way that combines a large degree of expressivity with the benefits of computability. A number of different ontologies have been developed for describing phenotypes, and

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