Contents

1 Introduction

In Bioconductor 3.19, ontoProc can work with OWL RDF/XML serializations of ontologies, via the owlready2 python modules.

The owl2cache function retrieves OWL from a URL or file and places it in a cache to avoid repetitious retrievals. The default cache is the one defined by BiocFileCache::BiocFileCache(). Here we work with the cell ontology. setup_entities2 will use basilisk to acquire owlready2 python modules that parse the OWL and produce an ontology_index instance (defined in CRAN package ontologyIndex).

library(ontoProc)
clont_path = owl2cache(url="http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/cl.owl")
cle = setup_entities2(clont_path)
cle
## Ontology with 16430 terms
## 
## Properties:
##  id: character
##  name: character
##  parents: list
##  children: list
##  ancestors: list
##  obsolete: logical
## Roots:
##  BFO_0000003 - NA
##  BFO_0000002 - NA
##  BFO_0000004 - NA
##  GO_0050878 - regulation of body fluid levels
##  BFO_0000040 - NA
##  GO_0010817 - regulation of hormone levels
##  BFO_0000015 - NA
##  UBERON_0001062 - anatomical entity
##  UBERON_0000000 - processual entity
##  BFO_0000020 - NA
##  ... 400 more

The usual plotting approach works.

sel = c("CL_0000492", "CL_0001054", "CL_0000236", 
"CL_0000625", "CL_0000576", 
"CL_0000623", "CL_0000451", "CL_0000556")
onto_plot2(cle, sel)

2 Illustration with Human Phenotype ontology

We’ll obtain and ad hoc selection of 15 UBERON term names and visualize the hierarchy.

hpont_path = owl2cache(url="http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hp.owl")
## resource BFC4481 already in cache from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/hp.owl
hpents = setup_entities2(hpont_path)
kp = grep("UBER", names(hpents$name), value=TRUE)[21:30]
onto_plot2(hpents, kp)

The prefixes of class names in the ontology give a sense of its scope.

t(t(table(sapply(strsplit(names(hpents$name), "_"), "[", 1))))
##         
##          [,1] 
##   BFO       11
##   CHEBI   1849
##   CL      1151
##   GO      2563
##   HP     19434
##   HsapDv    12
##   MPATH     75
##   NBO       64
##   PATO     567
##   PR       206
##   RO         1
##   UBERON  5605

To characterize human phenotypes ontologically, CL, GO, CHEBI, and UBERON play significant roles.