building a cell and anatomy ontology of caenorhabditis elegans建立一个细胞和解剖学本体的线虫.pdfVIP

Comparative and Functional Genomics Comp Funct Genom 2003; 4: 121–126. Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI: 10.1002/cfg.248 Conference Review Building a cell and anatomy ontology of Caenorhabditis elegans Raymond Y. N. Lee* and Paul W. Sternberg WormBase, Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA *Correspondence to: Abstract Raymond Y. N. Lee, WormBase, 156-29 California Institute of We are endowed with a rich knowledge about Caenorhabditis elegans. Its stereotyped Technology, Pasadena, CA anatomy and development has stimulated research and resulted in the accumulation 91125, USA. of cell-based information concerning gene expression, and the role of specific cells E-mail: raymond@ in developmental signalling and behavioural circuits. To make the information more URL: accessible to sophisticated queries and automated retrieval systems, WormBase has begun to construct a C. elegans cell and anatomy ontology. Here we present our strategies and progress. Copyright  2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd. Received: 11 November 2002 Keywords: Caenorhabditis elegans ; ontology; cell and anatomy; information Accepted: 2 December 2002 technology Introduction of developmental indeterminacy; we know, at the electron microscopy (EM) level, how most neurons Ontologies allow better organization of knowledge. are connected to each other [1,15]; we know the By explicitly specifying semantics and relations, function of many cells in development or in mature ontolo