Standardized Immunology Data Annotation

ImmPort data is annotated with terms from several ontologies including Cell Ontology^{23 (link)}, Disease Ontology (disease-ontology.org), Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI; obi-ontology.org), Protein Ontology^{24 (link)}, and Vaccine Ontology^{25 (link)}. MedDRA (www.meddra.org) is used for adverse event terms and the NCI Thesaurus supplies terms from a variety of sources (e.g., CDISC). The Antibody Ontology (AntiO) is a new resource developed from data curated in ImmPort to provide standardized representation of monoclonal antibodies used in immunology research^{26 (link)}. Along with updates to OBI, it exemplifies the ongoing development of data standardization facilitated by ImmPort. An analogous problem arises in the case of cytokines, where no public domain registry has thus far been available. To fill this gap, a registry of cytokines, chemokines and their receptors was compiled (http://www.immport.org/immport-open/public/reference/cytokineRegistry) for the purpose of collecting, integrating, and mapping between entity names and synonyms. The cytokine registry draws on resources such NCBI Gene, HGNC, MGI, Protein Ontology, and UniProt. ImmPort engages with several data standards communities such as the Human Immune Phenotyping Consortium (HIPC) Standards Working Group^{18 (link)}, BioSharing (fairsharing.org), the Patient Derived Tumor Xenograft Minimal Information (PDX-MI) working group^{27 (link)} and the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative (datascience.nih.gov/bd2k/about) through its collaboration with CEDAR (http://metadatacenter.org).