Computational Neurosciences Ontology

"CNO is a controlled vocabulary composed of classes representing general concepts related to computational neuroscience. These concepts are organized in a hierarchy of concepts and related to each other using logical relations. One of the main relations is the hierarchical relation named “is a” relation. Knowing the relations between classes allows us to create simple sentences such as: “a model is a thing”, “a leaky integrate-and-fire is a model”, “voltage is a elementary model component”, … The first step for CNO development was to create a list of relevant terms and concepts from textbooks and from the different expertise of the MSM Task Force members. Based on this list of terms, we developed a first version of the Computational Neuroscience Ontology (CNO), using the OWL-DL standard proposed by W3C. The core of CNO is currently (January 2013) composed of 221 terms and 2 datatype properties. As Computational Neuroscience model are very diverse, CNO is still in development to integrate the most relevant concepts for annotating as many Computational Neuroscience models as possible. However, CNO aims to be a tool for the community and therefore contribution of the community would be highly valuable to bring CNO to a more mature distribution."