Meeting Abstract
This presentation reports on a series of workshops held to explore and implement the merger of two ontologies used to classify and annotate behavior. The NBO (NeuroBehavior Ontology) is a member of the OBO family of ontologies and contains over 800 terms for behavior processes and phenotypes. The ABO (Animal Behavior Ontology) was developed by a community of animal behavior researchers interested in metadata, developing a common vocabulary for ethograms and facilitating searches for digitally available behavioral datasets. In 2013 a 1-day session sponsored by the Phenotype Ontologies Research Coordination Network brought people involved in both ontologies together for the first time. Based on that session, a group of behavioral ecologists proposed to develop a way to integrate the two ontologies and were funded for two additional workshops through NSF and the Phenotype RCN. The first, in August 2014, brought together 17 animal behaviorists to review the NBO and ABO and propose changes to the NBO that would allow the ABO to be incorporated as a sub-ontology for behavioral ecologists and behaviorists working with non-model organisms. At a second workshop in October 2015, six participants of the 2014 workshop met with the developer of the NBO and several additional ontology development experts to delineate a process of integrating the ontologies in a way that would allow a subset for behavioral ecology to be defined in a theoretically coherent way, without rendering the NBO either incorrect or unverifiable (computationally intractable). This presentation will describe the changes made to the NBO and give examples of how the merged ontology will be used for behavioral studies of both model and non-model organisms. It will also demonstrate the value of this ontology for data-sharing, data-storage, and comparative research.
