COBrA-CT is supported by the BBSRC under the e-Science programme,
starting 1/10/2005. The project is led by Prof Bonnie Webber and Prof
Wenfei Fan, School of Informatics,and Prof Jonathan Bard, Biomedical
Sciences, University of Edinburgh.
The COBrA-CT project is addressing the re-formatting, editing and version management
problems that arise when bio-ontologies are
converted to the
Web Ontology Language
(OWL).
COBrA-CT provides the following tools:
- the OBO Explorer and Ontology Metadata
editors for OWL format bio-ontologies;
- the COBrA-CT Version Manager
application; providing access to
- the COBrA-CT Ontology Server;
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Data curation is important for many scientific
communities and in standards initiatives, and curation has been
recognised as a
priority for e-Science. Ontologies are of central importance in
curation, as only by defining the meaning of terms can the underlying
concepts
be clarified and agreed upon among the research community, and used
consistently for annotating
data. Ontologies themselves change and
so can be considered to be the objects
of curation.
A consistent, shared ontology is of critical importance to the sharing
of knowledge, and has long-term value in supporting a systems-level
approach to biology. For example, the Gene Ontology is in widespread use for data
mining and data visualisation, and has great potential for further integration
of data across the different levels of
biological granularity. Ontologies have also been identified as key resources in
numerous e-Science projects, including
AstroGrid
,
MyGrid
and the
Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC.
However, ontologies are not static: they must change to reflect changes
in science, to adapt to new uses and new encodings, to broaden their community or to
remedy flaws.
We address the re-formatting, editing and version management
problems that arise when bio-ontologies are
converted to OWL. OWL provides powerful knowledge
representation features and is supported by
tools and reasoners that can be usefully
exploited by bioinformaticians and biologists.
In order to have a stable platform for the proposed ontology
management server, and to make use of
e-Science infrastructure, we have chosen the
OGSA-DAI Grid middleware for both client and server.
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