The DACC uses ontologies to annotate experimental metadata in order to provide improved searching capabilities across the data, to build a technical framework for ensuring the accuracy of the metadata, and to facilitate the interoperability with other genomic databases. Ontologies provide consistent language, which facilitates the integration of datasets from diverse projects and is essential to ensure all the correct results are returned when browsing or searching the metadata.
Additionally, the DACC imports synonyms from each ontology term allowing for flexibility in free text search terms, while maintaining the controlled description of the metadata via the official term name. In the process, we are contributing to community efforts to improve these ontologies by working with ontology databases for New Term Requests and improving annotations of existing terms. To this end, the DACC is using the following ontologies to capture specific metadata categories:
Ontology terms have their own portal records and can be searched at the following links:
The IGVF DACC GitHub repository has details regarding the generation and updating of ontologies on the portal.