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Introduction:

This web site provides a community resource for the development of ontologies and other controlled vocabularies relevant to biology and biological experimentation. It was established as a result of the first conference on Standards and Ontologies for Functional Genomics (SOFG), which was held at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK, 17-20 November 2002.

The goal of the SOFG web site is the same as that of the conference: "to bring together biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists who are developing and using standards and ontologies with an emphasis on describing high-throughput functional genomics experiments".

Ontologies for human and mouse anatomy:

This web site is part of a community effort to integrate ontologies for human and mouse anatomy. Numerous ontologies for human and mouse anatomy exist or are being developed. Each has its own purpose. For the biologist who wants to annotate data with anatomical names this variety is confusing. As a first step towards improving the situation, we have listed the main resources available to the biomedical and bioinformatics communities. Several major groups have already joined this effort, but the list presented on these pages is only a beginning. Secondly, a small SOFG workshop developed the SAEL, a simple anatomy list that can be used directly for annotation (for example of cDNA or micro-array data) or as a direct entry point to more sophisticated anatomy ontologies. Our third effort will focus more deeply on the comparison and integration of major publicly available, digital anatomy resources.

If you feel that your own work should be included please contact Duncan Davidson who is co-ordinating this effort.