COBrA-CT: An e-Science tool for ontology curation BBSRC e-Science development grant BB/D006473/1

The number of bio-ontologies is growing rapidly, indicating their important role in bioinformatics. But lacking is support for their curation – in particular for version management and quality control. Tools for ontology management are required in order to deal with the continuous process of ontology revision – no bio-ontology that is in active use remains unchanged after publication. MeSH is revised annually with a major sweep of MedLine, while the Gene Ontology (GO) is augmented and changed at much shorter intervals. Since biological data is annotated with respect to the terms (concepts) from a particular version of an ontology, updating data annotation to reflect these changes and additions requires effective management of different versions of an ontology, efficient archiving of previous versions, and the ability to wind forward and back among these versions. Quality control of ontologies involves, inter alia, error checking of proposed changes, and communication of the rationale for the proposed changes.