Working with ontologies

Abstract

Ontologies are powerful and popular tools to encode data in a structured format and manage knowledge. A large variety of existing ontologies offer users access to biomedical knowledge. This chapter contains a short theoretical background of ontologies and introduces two notable examples: The Gene Ontology and the ontology for Biological Pathways Exchange. For both ontologies a short overview and working bioinformatic applications, i.e., Gene Ontology enrichment analyses and pathway data visualization, are provided.