FIGURE 1.
Ontology development (Noy and McGuiness 2001): The process of developing and deploying biological ontologies is a community effort that requires frequent iteration of the basic steps represented here as a cycle. The process begins by determining the scope of the ontology and proceeds next to considering how the ontology will be used. This is followed by enumeration of terms and definition of classes and relations, and the constraints that operate on these. Finally, the classes are populated with instances to create knowledge bases.
