=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3939/abstract3
|storemode=property
|title=Standardising Biological Trait Representation with the Ontology of Biological
Attributes (OBA)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3939/abstract3.pdf
|volume=Vol-3939
|authors=Arwa Ibrahim,Ray Stefancsik,Vinicius de Souza,Anita R. Caron,Nicolas Matentzoglu,James McLaughlin, Zoë M. Pendlington
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/IbrahimSSCMMP24
}}
==Standardising Biological Trait Representation with the Ontology of Biological
Attributes (OBA)==
Standardising biological trait representation with the
Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) – Abstract
Arwa Ibrahim1,∗ , Ray Stefancsik1 , Vinicius de Souza1 , Anita R. Caron1 , Nicolas Matentzoglu2 ,
James McLaughlin1 and Zoë M. Pendlington1
1
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Hinxton, Cambridgeshire CB10 1SD, UK
2
Semanticly, Athens, Greece
Abstract
The Ontology of Biological Attributes (OBA) is a standardised, species-independent, computationally-amenable
representation of phenotype traits relevant to biological, clinical, environmental and life science applications.
While many current phenotype ontologies describe abnormal phenotypes relative to some wild-type state,
OBA represents neutral traits or attributes. OBA has a central data integration role and employs Dead Simple
Ontology Design Patterns (DOS-DPs) templates for the automated classification of traits, drawing on terms
from domain-specific reference ontologies in a post-compositional approach. This computation based on logical
inferences and automated reasoners promotes interoperability as multiple links to these ontologies enables
powerful querying, knowledge graph integration and inference. In addition, due to its rich axiomatisation, a
central OBA use case is to provide structure to weakly axiomatised ontologies like the Vertebrate Ontology (VT)
and the Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO). The logical axioms in OBA provide a previously missing bridge that
can link Mendelian phenotypes with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and measurable traits. The GWAS
Catalog incorporates EFO in its curation workflows and there is an ongoing OBA mapping effort of the EFO
measurement branch. The Open Targets Platform, which identifies potential therapeutic drug targets, is a major
consumer of GWAS data, so OBA classes imported into EFO can facilitate computational drug target identification.
Also, there is an increasing demand from the GWAS Catalog for new trait terms to annotate summary statistics
sometimes containing hundreds or thousands of GWAS studies. The template-based curation workflow of OBA
means that the addition of new terms is highly scalable which is important in the context of the generation
of large amounts of scientific data, reducing the need for manual curation and eliminating human error. OBA
is a component of the Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno 2) and this integration allows for the grouping of
phenotypic effects across biological attributes. It is an Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry
compliant ontology and uses the Ontology Development Kit (ODK) to run releases, quality control checks and
external dependencies. It currently uses eleven DOS-DP templates that cover many anatomical, metabolite and
cellular attributes needed for data integration with the possibility to expand based on stakeholder and community
use cases.
Keywords
OBO ontologies, traits, attributes, phenotypes, ontology design patterns, DOS-DP, data integration, interoperabil-
ity, mappings
15th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies 2024, July 17-19, 2024, Enschede, The Netherlands
∗
Corresponding author.
Envelope-Open aibrahim@ebi.ac.uk (A. Ibrahim); stefancsik@ebi.ac.uk (R. Stefancsik); vinicius@ebi.ac.uk (V. d. Souza); anitac@ebi.ac.uk
(A. R. Caron); nicolas.matentzoglu@gmail.com (N. Matentzoglu); jmcl@ebi.ac.uk (J. McLaughlin); zmp@ebi.ac.uk
(Z. M. Pendlington)
Orcid 0000-0001-6757-4744 (A. Ibrahim); 0000-0001-8314-2140 (R. Stefancsik); 0000-0003-3961-0247 (V. d. Souza);
0000-0002-6523-4866 (A. R. Caron); 0000-0002-7356-1779 (N. Matentzoglu); 0000-0002-8361-2795 (J. McLaughlin);
0000-0002-4071-8397 (Z. M. Pendlington)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings