Homolonto: generating homology relationships by pairwise alignment of ontologies and application to vertebrate anatomy.
BACKGROUND
The anatomy of model species is described in ontologies, which are used to standardize the annotations of experimental data, such as gene expression patterns. To compare such data between species, we need to establish relations between ontologies describing different species.


RESULTS
We present a new algorithm, and its implementation in the software Homolonto, to create new relationships between anatomical ontologies, based on the homology concept. Homolonto uses a supervised ontology alignment approach. Several alignments can be merged, forming homology groups. We also present an algorithm to generate relationships between these homology groups. This has been used to build a multi-species ontology, for the database of gene expression evolution Bgee.


BACKGROUND
download section of the Bgee website http://bgee.unil.ch/
Parmentier
Gilles
G
Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Bastian
Frederic B
FB
Robinson-Rechavi
Marc
M
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D016208:Databases, Factual; D015870:Gene Expression; D006801:Humans; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods; D012984:Software; D014714:Vertebrates / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000235:genetics