Anatomical ontologies: names and places in biology
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* Corresponding author: Richard Baldock Richard.Baldock@hgu.mrc.ac.uk
Medical Research Council, Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh EH4 2XU, UK
Genome Biology 2005, 6:108 doi:10.1186/gb-2005-6-4-108
Published: 15 March 2005Abstract
Ontology has long been the preserve of philosophers and logicians. Recently, ideas from this field have been picked up by computer scientists as a basis for encoding knowledge and with the hope of achieving interoperability and intelligent system behavior. In bioinformatics, ontologies might allow hitherto impossible query and data-mining activities. We review the use of anatomy ontologies to represent space in biological organisms, specifically mouse and human.