Investigation of the fundamental strategy for interoperability of description of biological measurements

Abstract

Aiming the facilitation of the advanced integration of measurement data across various biological experiments, we have investigated the fundamental methodology to expand the Phenotypic Quality Ontology (PATO) commonly used for descriptions of biological phenotypes with the framework of the Yet Another More Advanced Top-level Ontology (YAMATO). The mapping of ontology terms of PATO to YAMATO’s framework represents several advanced aspects such as the introduction of the classification of quality values to represent scales of measurements, the distinction of the different contexts of the comparison of ordinal values, and the establishment of the interoperability of quality description formalisms between different top-level ontologies. In this study, we propose a logical base to integrate cross-species and cross-experimental annotations of biological measurements.