Experimental factor ontology

From HandWiki
Experimental Factor Ontology
Logo of the Experimental Factor Ontlogy.gif
Content
DescriptionBiomedical ontology
Data types
captured
Experimental and sample variables
OrganismsMultiple
Contact
Research centreEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory
LaboratoryEuropean Bioinformatics Institute
Primary citation[1]
Access
WebsiteEFO
Download URLDownload ontology
Sparql endpointEBI RDF Platform
Tools
Web applicationhttp://www.ebi.ac.uk/efo
Miscellaneous
Data release
frequency
monthly
Curation policyManually curated, text mining

Experimental factor ontology, also known as EFO, is an open-access ontology of experimental variables particularly those used in molecular biology.[1] The ontology covers variables which include aspects of disease, anatomy, cell type, cell lines, chemical compounds and assay information. EFO is developed and maintained at the EMBL-EBI as a cross-cutting resource for the purposes of curation, querying and data integration[2] in resources such as Ensembl,[3] ChEMBL and Expression Atlas.[4]

Scope and access

The original aim of EFO was to describe experimental variables in the EBI's Expression Atlas resource.[1][4] This consisted primarily of disease, anatomical regions and cell types. By December 2013 the scope had grown to include several other EMBL-EBI resources and several external projects including CellFinder,[5] cell lines from the ENCODE project and phenotype to SNP information in the NHGRI's Catalog of Published Genome-Wide Association Studies.[6]

EFO makes use of existing biomedical ontologies from the Open Biomedical Ontologies collection in order to improve interoperability with other resources which may also use these same ontologies, such as ChEBI[7] and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations.

All data in the database is non-proprietary or is derived from a non-proprietary source. It is thus freely accessible and available to anyone. In addition, each data item is fully traceable and explicitly referenced to the original source.

The EFO data is available through a public web interface, BioPortal Web Service hosted at the National Centre for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO)[8] and downloads.

See also

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Malone, J.; Holloway, E.; Adamusiak, T.; Kapushesky, M.; Zheng, J.; Kolesnikov, N.; Zhukova, A.; Brazma, A. et al. (2010). "Modeling sample variables with an Experimental Factor Ontology". Bioinformatics 26 (8): 1112–8. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btq099. PMID 20200009. 
  2. Brooksbank, C.; Bergman, M.T.; Apweiler, A.; Birney, E.; Thornton, J. = (2014). "The European Bioinformatics Institute's data resources 2014". Nucleic Acids Research 42 (Database issue): D18–D25. doi:10.1093/nar/gkt1206. PMID 24271396. 
  3. Flicek, P. (2014). "Ensembl 2014". Nucleic Acids Research 42 (Database issue): D749–D755. doi:10.1093/nar/gkt1196. PMID 24316576. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 Kapushesky, M.; Emam, I; Holloway, E; Kurnosov, P; Zorin, A; Malone, J; Rustici, G; Williams, E et al. (2010). "Gene Expression Atlas at the European Bioinformatics Institute". Nucleic Acids Research 38 (Database issue): D690–D698. doi:10.1093/nar/gkp936. PMID 19906730. 
  5. Seltmann, S. (2014). "CELDA – an ontology for the comprehensive representation of cells in complex systems". BMC Bioinformatics 14: 228. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-14-228. PMID 23865855. 
  6. Welter, D. (2014). "The NHGRI GWAS Catalog, a curated resource of SNP-trait associations". Nucleic Acids Research 42 (Database issue): D1001–D1006. doi:10.1093/nar/gkt1229. PMID 24316577. 
  7. De Matos, P.; Alcantara, R.; Dekker, A.; Ennis, M.; Hastings, J.; Haug, K.; Spiteri, I.; Turner, S. et al. (2009). "Chemical Entities of Biological Interest: An update". Nucleic Acids Research 38 (Database issue): D249–54. doi:10.1093/nar/gkp886. PMID 19854951. 
  8. "NCBO BioPortal". Stanford University. http://bioportal.bioontology.org/. 

External links