Table 2
Glossary of terms
Term	Description
Annotation	Descriptions that are added to data such as text
Curation	Representation of data (for example, biological data sets) through annotations (for example, through ontologies)
Entity/quality	A conceptual model of a term according to (a) an entity part that denotes an anatomical or process part and (b) a quality part that characterises how the entity is affected
Grounding	To establish the specific reference of a term according to an ontology
Mention	A sequence of words in a text that denotes a term according to some external reference system
Pre-composed (pre-coordinated) term	A term that has been affirmed and defined as a whole without division into its constituent parts
Post-composed (post-coordinated) term	A term that is defined according to the decomposition of its constituent parts and the grounding of those parts in one or more external ontologies
Ontology	A specification of a conceptualization
OWL	The Web Ontology Language is a family of formal languages intended to aid machine understanding of resources on the World Wide Web
RDF	Resource Description Framework is family of specifications for describing resources on the World Wide Web. It is a World Wide Web Consortium standard
Semantic Web	A collaborative movement to promote common data formats for data re-use by machines

Collier et al.

Collier et al. Genome Biology 2013 14:214   doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-9-214