Ontology of Craniofacial Development and Malformation

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Description

The Ontology of Craniofacial Development and Malformation (OCDM) is a mechanism for representing knowledge about craniofacial development and malformation, and for using that knowledge to facilitate integrating craniofacial data obtained via multiple techniques from multiple labs and at multiple levels of granularity. The OCDM is a project of the NIDCR-sponsored FaceBase Consortium, whose goal is to promote and enable research into the genetic and epigenetic causes of specific craniofacial abnormalities through the provision of publicly accessible, integrated craniofacial data. However, the OCDM should be usable for integrating any web-accessible craniofacial data, not just those data available through FaceBase. The OCDM is based on the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), our comprehensive ontology of canonical human adult anatomy, and includes modules to represent adult and developmental craniofacial anatomy in human, mouse and zebrafish, mappings between homologous structures in the different species, and associated malformations. We suggest that the OCDM can be useful not only for integrating craniofacial data, but also for expressing new knowledge gained from analyzing the integrated data.

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