Composite annotation for heart development

Abstract

This paper describes progress made in combining multiple ontologies in a post- coordinated approach. This is applied to the annotation of phenotvpes relevant to heart development and congenital heart diseases. The aim is to provide coordination for multiscale modeling and simulation that is presently being conducting in this field. Cardiac development is well understood within discrete levels of analysis. The application of the multiscale framework gives added value by unlocking relationships between genetic-based information at one level of analysis and the emergent phenotype at the cell and organ levels of abstraction. The challenge for a semantic representation is that this field encompasses multiple spatial and temporal scales. As a consequence, relevant terms come from a wide range of biomedical domains, and are therefore contained in several reference ontologies. The strategy for composite annotation provides a method for linking between multiscale measurement and modeling.