Drosophila anatomy ontology paper published in JBMS

The Drosophila Anatomy Ontology (DAO) has been around for twenty odd years...
Drosophila anatomy ontology paper published in JBMS image

The Drosophila anatomy ontology (DAO) has been around for around twenty years, which is getting on a bit. You might think such a crusty old beast may be a little set in its ways, unwilling to adapt to new informatics landscapes and new biological discoveries.

However, you would be wrong. The DAO has actually pioneered the way in many respects. Whilst many bio-ontologies were stuck in an old editing paradigm, the DAO was an early adopter of the OWL technology stack, and pioneered the way for other ontologies such as the GO to follow. The challenges of using the DAO to represent fly brain neuronal connectivity knowledge led to the construction of new relationships types that have been adopted in Uberon.

Costa et al have published a long-overdue description of the DAO:

Marta Costa, Simon Reeve, Gary Grumbling and David Osumi-Sutherland The Drosophila Anatomy Ontology Jounral of Biomedical Semantics 2013, 4:32

They describe the 8000 classes in the DAO, and the methods they used to refactor a twenty year old ontology into a modern OWL ontology.

Figure 4 from the paper shows the distribution of content in the DAO content

The majority of classes are in the nervous system branch, reflecting the detailed curation of nervous system cells performed as part of the Virtual Fly Brain (VFB) project.

The VFB provides an excellent example of how a well-axiomatized ontology can enhance a database system. If you haven’t tried the VFB, check it out now:

Chris Mungall December 1, 2013 |