Exploring CMPO

The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) allows you to search for terms within and across a number of biomedical ontologies. We can use OLS to explore CMPO for concepts or terms that we are interested in.

First, select CMPO from the list of ontologies. On the CMPO page, begin typing in the Search box – you can input term names you already know, or use free text. The OLS search includes a partial search term function, so as soon as you start typing you will begin to see suggested terms. Figure 3 shows a search in progress for the term “elongated“.

If you have a previously annotated dataset that includes CMPO identifiers – CMPO:000XXXX – then you can also use the search box shown in Figure 3. For example, searching for “0000316” will return the CMPO entry for “abnormal cell growth“.

The approach described above is useful if you want to find the CMPO terms to describe an observed phenotype. You can also search from the OLS homepage to run a query across all the ontologies supported by OLS. This can help you to discover other ontologies with shared or similar terms; this is useful if you are planning to combine a number of ontologies or if you are integrating different annotated datasets (mouse and human disease data, for example).