During the grant, routine conversations with Lars Vogt were inspirational and commiseratory, they frequently lead to aha moments, and practical outcomes. For example sharing screenshots of data models and interfaces allowed us refine our interfaces based on each-other’s feedback, and anticipate syncronizing approaches and tools in the future. Lars’ work on MorphDBase is truly semantically driven, not only are phenotypes and their metadata semantically based, so to are the applications and tools that generate those representations. Lars has created a complete frameworkd (SOCCOMAS) for building applications from an ontology up, i.e. everything is defined in an ontology, with middle-layers translating these ontologies into interfaces, business logic, and UI/UX rules.

Links to Lars’ products: