title: The Porifera Ontology (PORO): enhancing sponge systematics with an anatomy ontology.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Porifera (sponges) are ancient basal metazoans that lack organs. They provide insight into key evolutionary transitions, such as the emergence of multicellularity and the nervous system. In addition, their ability to synthesize unusual compounds offers potential biotechnical applications. However, much of the knowledge of these organisms has not previously been codified in a machine-readable way using modern web standards.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The Porifera Ontology is intended as a standardized coding system for sponge anatomical features currently used in systematics. The ontology is available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro.owl, or from the project homepage http://porifera-ontology.googlecode.com/. The version referred to in this manuscript is permanently available from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/poro/releases/2014-03-06/.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  By standardizing character representations, we hope to facilitate more rapid description and identification of sponge taxa, to allow integration with other evolutionary database systems, and to perform character mapping across the major clades of sponges to better understand the evolution of morphological features. Future applications of the ontology will focus on creating (1) ontology-based species descriptions; (2) taxonomic keys that use the nested terms of the ontology to more quickly facilitate species identifications; and (3) methods to map anatomical characters onto molecular phylogenies of sponges. In addition to modern taxa, the ontology is being extended to include features of fossil taxa.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, USA.
authors.forename: Robert W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Thacker
authors.affiliation: Museo Margarita, Boca de Rio, 6304 Venezuela.
authors.forename: Maria Cristina
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Díaz
authors.affiliation: CR2P, UMR 7207 CNRS-MNHN-UPMC, Département Histoire de la Terre, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Bâtiment de Géologie, CP48, 57 rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Adeline
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kerner
authors.affiliation: CR2P, UMR 7207 CNRS-MNHN-UPMC, Département Histoire de la Terre, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Bâtiment de Géologie, CP48, 57 rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Régine
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vignes-Lebbe
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, USA.
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Segerdell
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, USA.
authors.forename: Melissa A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Haendel
authors.affiliation: Genomics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA USA.
authors.forename: Christopher J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Mungall
keywords: Evolution; Morphology; Phylogenetics; Taxonomic identification