Dr Elliot Sollis
Ontologies are a powerful method of organising and classifying scientific information. In this workshop, we will present an overview of the concept and purpose of ontologies and how they can be used by biocurators to annotate and organise their data, supported by tooling.
As an example, we will present the African Population Ontology (AfPO), developed by the African Genomics Data Hub (AfriGen-D), and how it is being used to annotate African populations in genetic studies. We will also describe how the GWAS Catalog uses terms from the Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO) to annotate >20,000 different diseases and other traits analysed in genome-wide association studies. We will discuss some of the challenges and solutions we have encountered in developing ontologies and using them to annotate and structure biological resources.
We will also provide an overview of the suite of tools available from EMBL-EBI to support the use of ontologies by biocurators. These include the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS), which enables users to search >200 ontologies with a combined total of >9 million terms, and ZOOMA, a service that assists mapping data to ontologies. We will also discuss the recent implementation of AI agents to improve ontology workflows.
- Introduce the concept and purpose of ontologies within the context of biological data curation
- Demonstrate how ontologies are applied to projects such as the GWAS Catalog and AfriGen-D
- Present the range of EMBL-EBI tools that support ontology-based annotation and data integration
- Highlight practical challenges and solutions for implementing ontologies effectively
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Explain what ontologies are and describe their role in biocuration
- Identify how the GWAS Catalog and AfriGen-D incorporate ontologies into their workflows
- Access and use EMBL-EBI tools such as OLS and Zooma to explore and apply ontologies
- Recognise common challenges in ontology use and approaches to address them
Biocurators and researchers, who are interested in using ontologies for the first time to annotate and organise their data, or who would like to add new tools and methods to their current use of ontologies.
Participants should have a basic understanding of biological data. No prior