title: Thematic issue of the Second combined Bio-ontologies and Phenotypes Workshop.
abstract: This special issue covers selected papers from the 18th Bio-Ontologies Special Interest Group meeting and Phenotype Day, which took place at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Dublin in 2015. The papers presented in this collection range from descriptions of software tools supporting ontology development and annotation of objects with ontology terms, to applications of text mining for structured relation extraction involving diseases and phenotypes, to detailed proposals for new ontologies and mapping of existing ontologies. Together, the papers consider a range of representational issues in bio-ontology development, and demonstrate the applicability of bio-ontologies to support biological and clinical knowledge-based decision making and analysis.The full set of papers in the Thematic Issue is available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/sig .
authors.affiliation: Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia. karin.verspoor@unimelb.edu.au.
authors.forename: Karin
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8661-1544
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Verspoor
authors.affiliation: MRC Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre (SGDP), King's College London, London, SE5 8AF, UK.
authors.forename: Anika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Oellrich
authors.affiliation: The Language Technology Lab, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Nigel
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Collier
authors.affiliation: Centre for Clinical Genomics, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney, NSW, Australia.|St Vincent's Clinical School, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Tudor
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Groza
authors.affiliation: University of Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road, OX1 3QG, Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rocca-Serra
authors.affiliation: Brunel University London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Larisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Soldatova
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dumontier
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Nigam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Shah
mesh_terms: D064229:Biological Ontologies; D010641:Phenotype