The need for biological ontologies has risen in recent years in large part due to the rapid development of large biological databases. Successful ontologies in biology have emerged in the past few years, such as Gene Ontology, Rice Ontology, Plant Phenotype and Trait Ontology.

• Animal Trait Ontology (ATO)

Precise definition of animal trait terms (phenotypes) will help to capture the biologically relevant distinctions at the desired level of detail in an unambiguous fashion. It helps to correctly link the data to genome information in a database, and to allow meaningful comparisons. Previous work by Hu et al (2005)  on the PigQTLdb introduced simple ontologies in the form of controlled vocabularies to describe pig phenotypes/ traits, and to link them to QTL information (see link ).

• COB Editor

Existing ontology editing tools, such as the DAG-Edit (Day-Richter, 2004), did not seamlessly meet our needs, especially when there are demands for collaborativeness and scalability. We have created the Collaborative Ontology Builder (COB, Editor) to overcome these difficulties and provide a tool for the animal genetics/genomics community at large. Here is an example  of the software window. You can download the tool  and try it out. If you are interested to involve in the development of animal trait ontology, please fee freel to visit our project work tracking site .

• Features Highlights

Collaborativeness Ontology building is a collaborative process. In order for an ontology to be broadly useful to a certain community, it needs to capture the knowledge based on the collective expertise of multiple experts and research groups. Typically, a large ontology is built and curated by a community.

Scalability Stronger tools are needed to handle large-scale ontology for storage, editing, browsing, visualizing, reasoning and reusing. Those tools should enable processing of the ontology with limited time and space resources. Such characteristics call for mechanism and tools to support both scaleable and collaborative ontology building.

The ATO project is a community consortium, which needs inputs from all who wish to contribute and collaborate. You are welcome to join the consortium. See "To Participate" for more details.