02499nas a2200217   4500000000100000000000100001000000100002008004100003100002000044700001800064700002100082700001800103700001600121700001900137245005500156856004500211300000700256490000600263520199800269022001402267       2014                            d1 aNikhil Lingutla1 aJustin Preece1 aSinisa Todorovic1 aLaurel Cooper1 aLaura Moore1 aPankaj Jaiswal00aAISO: Annotation of Image Segments with Ontologies  uhttp://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/5/1/50  a500 v53 aBACKGROUND:Large quantities of digital images are now generated for biological collections, including those developed in projects premised on the high-throughput screening of genome-phenome experiments. These images often carry annotations on taxonomy and observable features, such as anatomical structures and phenotype variations often recorded in response to the environmental factors under which the organisms were sampled. At present, most of these annotations are described in free text, may involve limited use of non-standard vocabularies, and rarely specify precise coordinates of features on the image plane such that a computer vision algorithm could identify, extract and annotate them. Therefore, researchers and curators need a tool that can identify and demarcate features in an image plane and allow their annotation with semantically contextual ontology terms. Such a tool would generate data useful for inter and intra-specific comparison and encourage the integration of curation standards. In the future, quality annotated image segments may provide training data sets for developing machine learning applications for automated image annotation.RESULTS:We developed a novel image segmentation and annotation software application, "Annotation of Image Segments with Ontologies" (AISO). The tool enables researchers and curators to delineate portions of an image into multiple highlighted segments and annotate them with an ontology-based controlled vocabulary. AISO is a freely available Java-based desktop application and runs on multiple platforms. It can be downloaded at http://www.plantontology.org/software/AISO webcite.CONCLUSIONS:AISO enables curators and researchers to annotate digital images with ontology terms in a manner which ensures the future computational value of the annotated images. We foresee uses for such data-encoded image annotations in biological data mining, machine learning, predictive annotation, semantic inference, and comparative analyses.  a2041-1480