Class depictions
Status: intermediate draft
Authors and contributors:
- Chris Mungall (author)
Date: 2012
Document Type: metadata_description
Ontologies can be greatly enriched by including exemplar images. This article shows how images are associated with classes in the ontology.
Each image is represented as an OWL individual, the IRI of which resolves to an image on the web - for example this one.
This individual is of type 'depicts some FOO', where FOO is the class representing the anatomical structure being depicted
Class expressions can also be used to provide additional information. For example 'depicts some (mouth and part_of some Petromyzontidae)' or 'depicts some (mouth and has_quality open)'
Any OWL extension on uberon can include as many depictions as is required.
The core ontology does not yet include any direct depiction axioms - however, there is a hack such that any xref to a jpg or png is translated to depiction axioms in a separate ontology called depictions.owl.
Eventually the depiction axioms will be represented directly in the main ontology
Use the Image depictions view plugin.
Currently the depictions are not easily viewed on the web, but hopefully future versions of OntoBee will support this.
Currently each image has no metadata other than what structure it depicts (possibly including species). In future we will categorize the images (e.g. sketches vs iconic/cartoon representations vs photographs). We will also make use of other properties, including:
- dc:title
- dc:rights
- dc:creator
- scale
- microscopy vocabulary properties (for microscope images)