Phenote: An Ontology-based Method for the Annotation of Biological Phenotypes

Phenote (www.phenote.org) is an open-source, platform-independent application developed by the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies to facilitate the annotation of biological phenotypes using ontologies. Phenote was originally developed as a literature curation tool to record genotype-phenotype pairs, together with the provenance for the annotation. Phenote can be customized to suit any user-specified domain requiring ontology-based annotation. Typical users of Phenote include literature curators, laboratory researchers, and clinicians looking for a method to record data in a user-friendly and computable way. In this talk, we will present the users’ needs in the annotation process and illustrate the software features in a demo. We will discuss the storage and querying needs of the resulting phenotype annotations using a RDF triple store.