MGED. Welcome to the website of the ontology working group for the MGED project, which is charged with developing an ontology for describing samples used in microarray experiments.
What is an Ontology? From the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab:"An ontology is an explicit specification of some topic. For our purposes, it is a formal and declarative representation which includes the vocabulary (or names) for referring to the terms in that subject area and the logical statements that describe what the terms are, how they are related to each other, and how they can or cannot be related to each other.
Ontologies therefore provide a vocabulary for representing and communicating knowledge about some topic and a set of relationships that hold among the terms in that vocabulary. " NCBO BioPortal. OBI Ontology. The Gene Ontology. Jena Semantic Web Framework.