Ontodog: A Web-based Ontology Community View Generator

Reference ontologies are often very large and complex. When applied to a specific application, generally a subset of one reference ontology is needed. Moreover, the labels of ontology terms that were given in the perspective of ontology developers might not be preferred labels to the end users. Therefore, it is desirable to have a community view of a reference ontology that is a subset of the ontology including the terms needed for a particular application or community with user-preferred labels. Ontodog is a web-based system to support generation of ontology community views. Ontodog (http://ontodog.hegroup.org/) allows users to provide terms of interest in a source ontology and customized annotation information, such as user-preferred label. With these inputs, Ontodog can extract a subset of the source ontology containing all the terms of interest and generate user specified annotations in RDF/XML format (i.e., OWL files) which can be used to build an ontology community view. Currently over 100 ontologies including all OBO Foundry ontologies are available in Ontodog to generate views for a specific application or community. We demonstrate the application of Ontodog in generating ontology community views using the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) as the source ontology.