Supporting Database Annotations and Beyond with the Evidence & Conclusion Ontology (ECO)

The Evidence & Conclusion Ontology (ECO) is a community standard for summarizing evidence in scientific research in a controlled, structured way. Annotations at the world's most frequented biological databases (e.g. model organisms, UniProt, Gene Ontology) are supported using ECO terms. ECO describes evidence derived from experimental and computational methods, author statements curated from the literature, inferences drawn by curators, and other types of evidence. Here, we describe recent ECO developments and collaborations, most notably: (i) a new ECO website containing user documentation, up-to-date news, and visualization tools; (ii) improvements to the ontology structure; (iii) implementing logic via an ongoing collaboration with the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI); (iv) addition of numerous experimental evidence types; and (v) addition of new evidence classes describing computationally derived evidence. Due to its utility, popularity, and simplicity, ECO is now expanding into realms beyond the protein annotation community, for example the biodiversity and phenotype communities. As ECO continues to grow as a resource, we are seeking new users and new use cases, with the hope that ECO will continue to be a broadly used and easy-to-implement community standard for representing evidence in diverse biological applications. Feel free to visit two ECO-sponsored workshops at ICBO 2016 to learn more: 1. “An introduction to the Evidence and Conclusion Ontology and representing evidence in scientific research” and 2. “OBI-ECO Interactions & Evidence”. Keywords—annotation; biodiversity; biomedical investigation; conclusion; confidence; curation; evidence; experimental evidence; inference; provenance; sequence similarity.