Norman Morrison, University of Manchester Every biological specimen that is collected or sampled — whether for a museum collection, for epidemiological studies, for population studies, for ecological research, for research into evolution, biodiversity or sustainability, indeed any biological research — comes from a particular habitat where particular physical conditions prevail. How ever, at present there is no accepted semantic standard for describing the environment from which these biological samples are collected. This is a serious problem for any one wishing to retrieve and compare environmental data. The Environment Ontology (EnvO — www.environmentontology.org) provides an integrated approach to the problem of linking environmental data. The aims of EnvO are to support the semantically consistent description of, and computational reasoning over, environmental information associated with biological data of any organism or biological sample. In this talk I shall attempt to show how EnvO will help people build services in which you’ll be able to run queries like: “retrieve all metagenomic data from samples taken from deep sea thermal vents”. Furthermore, at the click of a button, you’ll also be able to automatically ‘relax’ your search space, enabling comparisons against datasets from other marine habitats, such as coral reef atoll or oceanic trench.
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