Annotate your data

Introduction

There are big advantages to annotating your own data using the Drosophila anatomy ontology.

1. The ontology provides a consistent vocabulary for your annotations.
2. Your data can be integrated with into searches and queries across the huge volume of data already annotated with this ontology including hundreds of thousands of annotations in FlyBase and Virtual Fly Brain.
3. You can leverage the semantics of the ontology to intelligently query your data. See, for example, all of the annotations found by querying Virtual Fly Brain for genes expressed in the medulla (a part of the optic lobes of the brain).

How to annotate

The most important part of any annotation with the Drosophila anatomy ontology is the presence of an ID. The ontology changes over time, but we guarantee that IDs will never be lost and that we will give you a path to migrate your data as painlessly as possible if ontology changes affect the terms you have used in annotation.

Options for annotation

• We maintain a google code site dedicated to templates for a spreadsheet based system for annotating with the Drosophila anatomy ontology. The resulting spreadsheets have a validation system, ensuring that you only annotate with valid term names. IDs are linked behind the scenes so you don't have to worry about them. This system also provides the option of writing the resulting spreadsheets to OWL, allowing the semantics of annotation to be strictly specified and annotations to be queried in combination with the Drosophila anatomy ontology using OWL-DL queries.
• Phenote is a configurable tool for producing tables of annotations using ontology terms.
• Protege 4 - is a massively flexible and configurable system for generating OWL individuals defined using the anatomy and/or development ontology. But there is a rather steep learning curve.