Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on February 1, 2008
Bioinformatics 2008 24(6):885-887; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn042
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ONTO-PERL: An API for supporting the development and analysis of bio-ontologies
1Department of Plant Systems Biology, VIB, 2Department of Molecular Genetics, Ghent University, Technologiepark 927, 9052 Gent, Belgium, 3University of Manchester, School of Computer Science, Oxford Road, M13 9PL Manchester, UK and 4Department of Applied Mathematics, Biometrics and Process Control, Ghent University, Computer links 653, 9000 Gent, Belgium
*To whom correspondence should be addressed.
| Abstract |
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Motivation: Many biomedical ontologies use OBO or OWL as knowledge representation language. The rapid increase of such ontologies calls for adequate tools to facilitate their use. In particular, there is a pressing need to programmatically deal with such ontologies in many applications, including data integration, text mining, as well as semantic applications supporting translational research.
Results: We present an Application Programming Interface (API) called ONTO-PERL. This API significantly extends the repertoire of available tools supporting the development and analysis of bio-ontologies.
Availability: The source code code as well as sample usage scripts can be found at: http://search.cpan.org/dist/ONTO-PERL/
Contact: erick.antezana{at}psb.ugent.be
Associate Editor: Alex Bateman
Received on October 28, 2007; revised on December 27, 2007; accepted on January 25, 2008