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. 2022 Jan 7;50(D1):D1515-D1521.
doi: 10.1093/nar/gkab1025.

ECO: the Evidence and Conclusion Ontology, an update for 2022

Affiliations

ECO: the Evidence and Conclusion Ontology, an update for 2022

Suvarna Nadendla et al. Nucleic Acids Res. .

Abstract

The Evidence and Conclusion Ontology (ECO) is a community resource that provides an ontology of terms used to capture the type of evidence that supports biomedical annotations and assertions. Consistent capture of evidence information with ECO allows tracking of annotation provenance, establishment of quality control measures, and evidence-based data mining. ECO is in use by dozens of data repositories and resources with both specific and general areas of focus. ECO is continually being expanded and enhanced in response to user requests as well as our aim to adhere to community best-practices for ontology development. The ECO support team engages in multiple collaborations with other ontologies and annotating groups. Here we report on recent updates to the ECO ontology itself as well as associated resources that are available through this project. ECO project products are freely available for download from the project website (https://evidenceontology.org/) and GitHub (https://github.com/evidenceontology/evidenceontology). ECO is released into the public domain under a CC0 1.0 Universal license.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
ECO assertion types and example annotations. (A) example of how evidence type and assertion type are combined to make leaf nodes describing both. (B) Illustration of the use of sequence alignment for both an automatic and manual annotation, the entry of that information into a database, and the distribution of that information to the user community. Green boxes contain ECO terms. MOD = model organism database.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Tree view of ECO. This tree shows all of the top level children of ‘evidence’ as well as a sample of more granular terms under ‘similarity evidence’ including assertion-type leaf nodes. Tree made using the BioPortal tool (7).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
ECO website updates. This figure highlights some of the changes to the ECO website.

References

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