With the vast amounts of biomedical data being generated by high-throughput analysis methods, controlled vocabularies and ontologies are becoming increasingly important to annotate units of information for ease of search and retrieval. Each scientific community tends to create its own locally available ontology. The interfaces to query these ontologies tend to vary from group to group. We saw the need for a centralized location to perform controlled vocabulary queries that would offer both a lightweight web-accessible user interface as well as a consistent, unified SOAP interface for automated queries.
Pubmed ID: 16507094 RIS Download
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Interactive and programmatic interfaces to query, browse and navigate an increasing number of biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies. It provides a web service interface to query multiple ontologies from a single location with a unified output format. It can integrate any ontology available in the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) format. The database can be queried to obtain information on a single term or to browse a complete ontology using AJAX. Auto-completion provides a user-friendly search mechanism. An AJAX-based ontology viewer is available to browse a complete ontology or subsets of it. A weekly MySQL database export file can be downloaded from the EBI public FTP directory.
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