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Standardized description of scientific evidence using the Evidence Ontology (ECO)

Journal Article · · Database
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [4];  [2];  [7]
  1. Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Inst. for Genome Sciences; Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology; DOE/OSTI
  2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Genomics Division
  3. Stanford Univ., CA (United States). Dept. of Genetics. Saccharomyces Genome Database
  4. The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME (United States). Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
  5. Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge (United Kingdom). European Molecular Biology Lab.- European Bioinformatics Inst. (EMBL-EBI)
  6. Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Inst. for Genome Sciences; Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Dept. of Epidemiology
  7. Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Inst. for Genome Sciences; Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD (United States). School of Medicine. Dept. of Medicine
The Evidence Ontology (ECO) is a structured, controlled vocabulary for capturing evidence in biological research. ECO includes diverse terms for categorizing evidence that supports annotation assertions including experimental types, computational methods, author statements and curator inferences. Using ECO, annotation assertions can be distinguished according to the evidence they are based on such as those made by curators versus those automatically computed or those made via high-throughput data review versus single test experiments. Originally created for capturing evidence associated with Gene Ontology annotations, ECO is now used in other capacities by many additional annotation resources including UniProt, Mouse Genome Informatics, Saccharomyces Genome Database, PomBase, the Protein Information Resource and others. Information on the development and use of ECO can be found at http://evidenceontology.org. The ontology is freely available under Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0), and can be downloaded in both Open Biological Ontologies and Web Ontology Language formats at http://code.google.com/p/evidenceontology. Also at this site is a tracker for user submission of term requests and questions. ECO remains under active development in response to user-requested terms and in collaborations with other ontologies and database resources.
Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Biological Systems Science Division
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1625305
Journal Information:
Database, Journal Name: Database Journal Issue: 0 Vol. 2014; ISSN 1758-0463
Publisher:
Oxford University Press - International Society for BiocurationCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations journal April 2016
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An ontology for factors affecting tuberculosis treatment adherence behavior in sub-Saharan Africa journal April 2016
Computer-Aided Experiment Planning toward Causal Discovery in Neuroscience journal February 2017
The Plant Ontology Facilitates Comparisons of Plant Development Stages Across Species journal June 2019
The Confidence Information Ontology: a step towards a standard for asserting confidence in annotations text January 2015
Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences journal March 2020
Strategies to improve usability and preserve accuracy in biological sequence databases journal September 2016
Quality Matters: Biocuration Experts on the Impact of Duplication and Other Data Quality Issues in Biological Databases journal April 2020
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UniProt: the Universal Protein knowledgebase journal January 2004
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The Monarch Initiative: an integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species journal November 2016
UniProt: the universal protein knowledgebase journal February 2018
Bovine Genome Database: new annotation tools for a new reference genome journal October 2019
A Logical Model of Homology for Comparative Biology journal October 2019
A harmonized meta-knowledgebase of clinical interpretations of cancer genomic variants journal October 2018
Quality Matters: Biocuration Experts on the Impact of Duplication and Other Data Quality Issues in Biological Databases posted_content January 2019
Challenges in the annotation of pseudoenzymes in databases: the UniProtKB approach journal November 2019
Systematics for types and effects of DNA variations journal December 2018
An ontology for major histocompatibility restriction journal January 2016
A new bioinformatics tool to help assess the significance of BRCA1 variants journal July 2018
The anatomy of phenotype ontologies: principles, properties and applications text January 2017
Primer on the Gene Ontology text January 2016

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