dosumis
commented
1 year ago I suspect that the ABO approach may also be useful for annotating observational behavioural data such as FlyBowl home cage experiments (e.g. https://www.noldus.com/blog/high-throughput-method-natural-behavior-mice). I planned to use it for FlyBowl annotation as part of Virtual Fly Brain but some of the required collaborative effort broke down.
Use case 2: Behavioural studies of model organisms centred on behavioural testing paradigms.
- see use of NBO and related GO terms in model organism phenotype ontologies. We can generate a report of these. NBO is doing dome useful work here. We should not break this. Lots of potentially relevant refs from usage of these terms in annotation.
Use case 3: Clinical
The only use I'm aware of is in the Human Phenotype Ontology (but there may be others). We can get a report of these.
The promise of an ontology like this is that it can bridge between animal and human data. It does some useful work under use cases 2 and 3 which we should not break. The merge with ABO was never done properly. I think it could be done without breaking use cases 2 and 3. That seems like a reasonable aim.
In the end, fixing it more comprehensively will need proper funding.
DitchingIt
matentzn
pmidford
aclark-binghamton-edu
rays22
Background
We know some of the original aims for merging the Animal Behavior Ontology (ABO) with the NBO, but things seem to have come off the rails: Leadership has evaporated, there is no paid curation, just occasional 'hacking', some of those originally involved in ABO have gone back to using it 'off-line' instead of NBO, and others who once appeared commited appear to have given up on it. @matentzn is working on a process which should lead to the deprecation of the phenotype branch from NBO. Being realistic, NBO is almost defunct - indeed @cmungall has suggested it might be time to call time on NBO. I remain hopeful that something viable can emerge from NBO.
What next?
@dosumis has suggested collecting use cases before a radical overhaul of NBO. I agree with a proviso: Nothing theoretical and no direct return to the original aims, because they have essentially failed. Starting afresh, what would any potential user realistically want from NBO?
From discussions I have been part of since December 2022, the only real hope I have seen expressed by anyone has been along the lines of:
Is there any other use case that anyone feels passionate about - not just hope that someone else would do, or possibly use if it was there? Because I think that there would be commitment to work on an ethology-based ontology, IF it had much of the purely human or invisible stuff stripped out.
Any thoughts?