Integrating partonomic hierarchies in anatomy ontologies.
BACKGROUND
Anatomy ontologies play an increasingly important role in developing integrated bioinformatics applications. One of the primary relationships between anatomical tissues represented in such ontologies is part-of. As there are a number of ways to divide up the anatomical structure of an organism, each may be represented by more than one valid partonomic (part-of) hierarchy. This raises the issue of how to represent and integrate multiple such hierarchies.


RESULTS
In this paper we describe a solution that is based on our work on an anatomy ontology for mouse embryo development, which is part of the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project (EMAP). The paper describes the basic conceptual aspects of our approach and discusses strengths and limitations of the proposed solution. A prototype was implemented in Prolog for evaluation purposes.


CONCLUSIONS
With the proposed name set approach, rather than having to standardise hierarchies, it is sufficient to agree on a suitable set of basic tissue terms and their meaning in order to facilitate the integration of multiple partonomic hierarchies.
Burger
Albert
A
MRC Human Genetics Unit, Western General Hospital, Crewe Road, Edinburgh EH4 2XU, UK. Albert.Burger@hgu.mrc.ac.uk
Davidson
Duncan
D
Yang
Yiya
Y
Baldock
Richard
R
D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification*; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D030541:Databases, Genetic / Q000592:standards; D004622:Embryo, Mammalian / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D047108:Embryonic Development / Q000502:physiology*; D018507:Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental / Q000235:genetics; D008648:Mesoderm / Q000145:classification; D051379:Mice; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D012984:Software; D012985:Software Design