Evaluation of ontology development tools for bioinformatics

Abstract

Ontologies are being used nowadays in many areas, including bioinformatics. To assist users in developing and maintaining ontologies a number of tools have been developed. In this paper we compare four such tools, Protégé-2000, Chimaera, DAG-Edit and OilEd. As test ontologies we have used ontologies from the Gene Ontology Consortium. No system is preferred in all situations, but each system has its own strengths and weaknesses.