Ontologies or controlled vocabularies are fundamental to data access and data sharing in the sciences. This project consists of two workshops where ontology developers would connect the Animal Behavior Ontology (ABO), an ontology of normal behavior across a wide variety of animals, to the NeuroBehavior Ontology (NBO), a well-developed ontology of the behavioral phenotypes of model organisms. As behavioral studies have become increasingly inter-disciplinary and collaborative, establishing a cohesive framework within which data can be labeled and shared becomes increasingly important to allow full utilization of data produced with federal support. The joined ABO and NBO will become one ontology, the Comprehensive Behavioral Ontology.
Ontologies are controlled vocabularies that specify the classes of objects that exist, the relationships among those classes, and the possible relationships among instances of the classes. More than 10 years ago behaviorists began to create the Animal Behavior Ontology (ABO), an ontology of normal behavior across non-model taxa. As animal behavior expanded to include behavior genetics, genomics, neurobiology and particularly the use of model organisms, specialized ontologies are being developed. The NeuroBehavior Ontology (NBO) is a well-developed ontology of the behavioral phenotypes of model organisms, but it lacks a formal structural relationship to the taxonomically broad and evolution-based ABO. To bring about the integration of these two ontologies, we propose a series of two workshops. The first will convene animal behavior experts to identify the categories in each ontology that need to be defined, resolved and organized in terms of relationships. The second workshop will bring together ontology experts with behavioral biologists to take the recommendations and materials developed in the first workshop and make the necessary changes in the NBO that will make full integration possible. The researchers will disseminate the ontologies through journal article and working with publishers to include the ontology's meta data terms in supplementary material and deposited data.
