Development of an Application Ontology for Beta Cell Genomics Based On the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations.

The development process for the beta cell genomics application ontology (BCGO) is described. This process should be generally applicable and consists of integration of a subset of reference ontologies. A key element is use of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigation (OBI) as an ontology framework. Another element is enriching ontologies using existing patterns when needed. The ontology is validated in three aspects based on our needs including data annotation, queries and automated classification. The BCGO is available on: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bcgo.owl.