UNLABELLED: The first open source software suite for experimentalists and curators that (i) assists in the annotation and local management of experimental metadata from high-throughput studies employing one or a combination of omics and other technologies; (ii) empowers users to uptake community-defined checklists and ontologies; and (iii) facilitates submission to international public repositories. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Software, documentation, case studies and implementations at http://www.isa-tools.org.

BACKGROUND: A wide variety of ontologies relevant to the biological and medical domains are available through the OBO Foundry portal, and their number is growing rapidly. Integration of these ontologies, while requiring considerable effort, is extremely desirable. However, heterogeneities in format and style pose serious obstacles to such integration. In particular, inconsistencies in naming conventions can impair the readability and navigability of ontology class hierarchies, and hinder their alignment and integration. While other sources of diversity are tremendously complex and challenging, agreeing a set of common naming conventions is an achievable goal, particularly if those conventions are based on lessons drawn from pooled practical experience and surveys of community opinion. RESULTS: We summarize a review of existing naming conventions and highlight certain disadvantages with respect to general applicability in the biological domain. We also present the results of a survey carried out to establish which naming conventions are currently employed by OBO Foundry ontologies and to determine what their special requirements regarding the naming of entities might be. Lastly, we propose an initial set of typographic, syntactic and semantic conventions for labelling classes in OBO Foundry ontologies. CONCLUSION: Adherence to common naming conventions is more than just a matter of aesthetics. Such conventions provide guidance to ontology creators, help developers avoid flaws and inaccuracies when editing, and especially when interlinking, ontologies. Common naming conventions will also assist consumers of ontologies to more readily understand what meanings were intended by the authors of ontologies used in annotating bodies of data.

MOTIVATION: The generation of large amounts of microarray data and the need to share these data bring challenges for both data management and annotation and highlights the need for standards. MIAME specifies the minimum information needed to describe a microarray experiment and the Microarray Gene Expression Object Model (MAGE-OM) and resulting MAGE-ML provide a mechanism to standardize data representation for data exchange, however a common terminology for data annotation is needed to support these standards. RESULTS: Here we describe the MGED Ontology (MO) developed by the Ontology Working Group of the Microarray Gene Expression Data (MGED) Society. The MO provides terms for annotating all aspects of a microarray experiment from the design of the experiment and array layout, through to the preparation of the biological sample and the protocols used to hybridize the RNA and analyze the data. The MO was developed to provide terms for annotating experiments in line with the MIAME guidelines, i.e. to provide the semantics to describe a microarray experiment according to the concepts specified in MIAME. The MO does not attempt to incorporate terms from existing ontologies, e.g. those that deal with anatomical parts or developmental stages terms, but provides a framework to reference terms in other ontologies and therefore facilitates the use of ontologies in microarray data annotation. AVAILABILITY: The MGED Ontology version.1.2.0 is available as a file in both DAML and OWL formats at http://mged.sourceforge.net/ontologies/index.php. Release notes and annotation examples are provided. The MO is also provided via the NCICB's Enterprise Vocabulary System (http://nciterms.nci.nih.gov/NCIBrowser/Dictionary.do). CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: Incorporation of ontologies into annotations has enabled 'semantic integration' of complex data, making explicit the knowledge within a certain field. One of the major bottlenecks in developing bio-ontologies is the lack of a unified methodology. Different methodologies have been proposed for different scenarios, but there is no agreed-upon standard methodology for building ontologies. The involvement of geographically distributed domain experts, the need for domain experts to lead the design process, the application of the ontologies and the life cycles of bio-ontologies are amongst the features not considered by previously proposed methodologies. RESULTS: Here, we present a methodology for developing ontologies within the biological domain. We describe our scenario, competency questions, results and milestones for each methodological stage. We introduce the use of concept maps during knowledge acquisition phases as a feasible transition between domain expert and knowledge engineer. CONCLUSION: The contributions of this paper are the thorough description of the steps we suggest when building an ontology, example use of concept maps, consideration of applicability to the development of lower-level ontologies and application to decentralised environments. We have found that within our scenario conceptual maps played an important role in the development process.

UNLABELLED: Pedro is a Java application that dynamically generates data entry forms for data models expressed in XML Schema, producing XML data files that validate against this schema. The software uses an intuitive tree-based navigation system, can supply context-sensitive help to users and features a sophisticated interface for populating data fields with terms from controlled vocabularies. The software also has the ability to import records from tab delimited text files and features various validation routines. AVAILABILITY: The application, source code, example models from several domains and tutorials can be downloaded from http://pedro.man.ac.uk/.