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Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC): Enriching peripheral nervous system ontology development
Monique Surles-Zeigler, Tom Gillespie, Troy Sincomb, Jeffrey Grethe, Maryann E. Martone
Presenting author:
Monique Surles-Zeigler
The Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program is a NIH-funded effort to improve our understanding of the neural circuitry responsible for visceral control. As with most biomedical research, the data being produced by the SPARC consortium crosses multiple organs, species, and techniques. The SPARC vocabulary is being developed to annotate SPARC data using UBERON, a multi-species ontology, supplemented with additional ontologies, while augmenting these vocabularies with new terms as needed. The SPARC Anatomy Working Group (SAWG), a group of anatomical experts, was formed to ensure that the new anatomical terms requested are accurate, non-duplicative, and defined. As part of this process, a term request pipeline was developed to enable SPARC investigators to regularly submit anatomical terms to the SPARC vocabularies housed within the InterLex database, an online database for viewing and building ontologies through combining new and existing ontology terms.