Saturday, August 9, 2014

Finished up a Behavioral Ontology workshop, now at ABS2014

We finished up the first of our two workshops to followup the one-day session we held in conjunction with the 2013 phenotype RCN summit.  We gathered together a fairly diverse group of 15 behavior people at Princeton for a day and a half prior to the ABS 2014 meeting.  Our task was to compare the ABO (the ontology constructed over the course of two workshops in 2004 and 2005 at Cornell) and the NBO (the ontology for behavior processes and phenotypes developed within the OBO framework).  Despite some initial fears, it looks like we have a good chance of coming up with a proposed integration of these that will allow behavioral ecologists to make use of the NBO while not breaking things for the current users, mostly model organism genetics and phenotype investigators.

Thanks to all who attended, my three co-organizers (Anne Clark, Sue Margulis, Cyndy Parr) and also to George Gkoutos, developer and maintainer of the NBO, who listened through most of our friday session and took an hour to host a question and answer session over skype. 

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

I'll be at ABS2014 next week.

I’ll be presenting a poster at the Animal Behavior Society meeting next week in Princeton New Jersey. The poster is NE 116. If you aren’t attending, the poster and a supporting script file are now up on figshare. The poster looks at how well NBO serves as a vocabulary for spider behavior. It turned out to do a little better than I expected, and I omitted a couple of statistically non-significant tests I tried over the weekend (looking at term depth across NBO vs depth of NBO terms used in 40 arachnolingua claims).

Note: there is a small chance I may not be able to attend the poster on Tuesday evening. I’ll update this if it turns out I won’t be there.