Linking to additional ontologies

[Anne]

When creating a protocol or experiment, and using the Ontology parameter, how do I link to additional ontologies (ie other than those already included). Apologies if I have missed this somewhere ...

[wmoore]

Hi,

The Editor uses http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ontology-lookup/ to lookup terms. Do they already support your chosen ontology (we may need to update the Editor's list)?

I don't know how you can get the OLS to add support for your chosen ontology or even if it's in the right format (OBO)?

Do your chosen ontologies have some way of looking up terms programmatically? E.g. via webservices or Java, like the OLS? If so, there's a possibility to add them to the Editor.
How do you currently look-up terms from these ontologies? E.g. browse the web, then copy & paste? Use some other tool E.g. Phenote?

We could allow manual entry of Ontology and Term ID to "Ontology Parameters" in the Editor, but then you might as well use a "Text Parameter" (unless you're using some program to read the XML files created by Editor?). If they're just human readable then a text parameter could be used for manually entered terms?

Cheers,

Will.