Research Project
During the summer of 2013, I had the privilege of participating
in the creation and navigation of the world’s largest ontology
of anatomical structures. The overarching project is called
FaceBase,
which is a program intended to collect data about
craniofacial development of humans, mice, and eventually
chickens and zebrafish. In trying to define as many terms as
possible to describe physical properties of humans and these
animals, FaceBase aims to compare side-by-side the anatomical
structures of humans and these animals.
More specifically, FaceBase has numerous sub-projects, and the
project on which my team of about 6 people including myself
are focusing is called the Ontology of Craniofacial Development
and Malformation (OCDM). The OCDM is a computer-parsable and
human readable source of knowledge about the anatomy of human and
mouse heads. The OCDM contains 28,000+ names of anatomical
structures, 190+ unique properties, and 300+ mappings between
structures. Therefore, an efficient and intuitive query engine
and query interface is required for a user to retrieve knowledge
relevant to his/her questions for the OCDM.
My job this summer was to help create three different web-based query interfaces which would allow a user to ask questions of the OCDM and receive a response. The first allowed a user to type in an anatomical structure and choose from a static list of properties: Query Interface. The second project used one query and allowed the user to navigate the OCDM by typing either a class name or an instance (which are two different ways of storing knowledge in the OCDM): OCDM Browser. Lastly, my final project was the creation of 
, a query engine to help users of the OCDM to navigate it using sets of objects (which are the results of the query) and patterns (which are nested relationships between anatomical structures in the OCDM): Cranio-Dynamic.
For more information, please visit the following links:
Copyright © 2013 Emilia Holbik
