BioPortal Release 2 Release Notes

This page contains software release notes for the 2.x series of BioPortal.

Please see the main release notes page to access release notes for other versions.

BioPortal 2.6.4 (2011-Feb)

New features include additional Web services and Web interface enhancements:

Mapping Web services - Access to ontology term mappings, including UMLS, OBO DbXref, and LOOM mappings ( http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/BioPortal_Mappings_Service ) Please note, the prototype Mapping Web service will be removed March 23
RDF Download Web service - Access any BioPortal ontology in RDF ( http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/NCBO_REST_services#RDF_Term_Service and http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/NCBO_REST_services#RDF_Download_Service )
Notes - Ability to archive Notes, e.g. accepted term proposals, and filter from display
Annotator
- Updated ontology content
- Offsets corrected for non-ASCII characters
- Link to Annotator Web interface using parameters
- Web interface enhancements
Display of ontology development status
Hyperlinks on term details page
Ability to add comments on Mappings

New features in this release include the following:

Support for structured notes and term requests: Users can now use BioPortal to request that content developers add new terms or update other ontology content. BioPortal provides a structured template for making such requests, allowing users to suggest preferred names, synonyms, and definitions for the requested terms. BioPortal stores the requests as structured notes that are attached to the ontology and that other ontology tools, such as Protégé, will be able to use.

Support for email notifications to interested parties whenever a BioPortal user creates new notes for an ontology of interest. (If you would like to subscribe to notifications about a particular ontology, please send email to support at bioontology.org. We will have an interactive form to sign-up for notifications shortly.)

Prototype Web services to generate RDF representation for terms in ontologies in BioPortal (see documentation [1] for details).

Prototype end-point for SPARQL access to all ontologies in BioPortal: http://sparql.bioontology.org

Web services for retrieving instance information for OWL ontologies [1]. We are planning to release a user interface for viewing instances shortly.

New ontology widgets that developers can embed on their Web sites, including an ontology tree widget that allows Web-site authors to present a display of an ontology or an ontology subtree for any BioPortal ontology in any Web page.

Preview release of Bio-Mixer, a mashup tool that provides extremely flexible browsing and exploration of ontologies and their mappings