Treffer: The Ontology Lookup Service, a lightweight cross-platform tool for controlled vocabulary queries.

Title:
The Ontology Lookup Service, a lightweight cross-platform tool for controlled vocabulary queries.
Authors:
Côté RG; European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK. rcote@ebi.ac.uk, Jones P, Apweiler R, Hermjakob H
Source:
BMC bioinformatics [BMC Bioinformatics] 2006 Feb 28; Vol. 7, pp. 97. Date of Electronic Publication: 2006 Feb 28.
Publication Type:
Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Language:
English
Journal Info:
Publisher: BioMed Central Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 100965194 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1471-2105 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 14712105 NLM ISO Abbreviation: BMC Bioinformatics Subsets: MEDLINE
Imprint Name(s):
Original Publication: [London] : BioMed Central, 2000-
MeSH Terms:
Database Management Systems* , Databases, Factual* , Natural Language Processing* , Software* , User-Computer Interface* , Vocabulary, Controlled*, Information Storage and Retrieval/*methods, Programming Languages
References:
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Entry Date(s):
Date Created: 20060302 Date Completed: 20060426 Latest Revision: 20230415
Update Code:
20250114
PubMed Central ID:
PMC1420335
DOI:
10.1186/1471-2105-7-97
PMID:
16507094
Database:
MEDLINE

Weitere Informationen

Background: With the vast amounts of biomedical data being generated by high-throughput analysis methods, controlled vocabularies and ontologies are becoming increasingly important to annotate units of information for ease of search and retrieval. Each scientific community tends to create its own locally available ontology. The interfaces to query these ontologies tend to vary from group to group. We saw the need for a centralized location to perform controlled vocabulary queries that would offer both a lightweight web-accessible user interface as well as a consistent, unified SOAP interface for automated queries.
Results: The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) was created to integrate publicly available biomedical ontologies into a single database. All modified ontologies are updated daily. A list of currently loaded ontologies is available online. The database can be queried to obtain information on a single term or to browse a complete ontology using AJAX. Auto-completion provides a user-friendly search mechanism. An AJAX-based ontology viewer is available to browse a complete ontology or subsets of it. A programmatic interface is available to query the webservice using SOAP. The service is described by a WSDL descriptor file available online. A sample Java client to connect to the webservice using SOAP is available for download from SourceForge. All OLS source code is publicly available under the open source Apache Licence.
Conclusion: The OLS provides a user-friendly single entry point for publicly available ontologies in the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) format. It can be accessed interactively or programmatically at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ontology-lookup/.