The Atlas of Mouse Development has served as a principal reference for mouse anatomists and developmental biologists and has also provided a crucial basis for databases that represent and integrate data relating to developmental anatomy. Using the Atlas as a key reference, an extensive ontology of mouse developmental anatomy has been developed in order to represent the anatomy in a standardized and searchable form. This ontology is being used by the Gene Expression Database for Mouse Development (GXD), the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas and Gene Expression Database (EMAGE), and other resources to record the time and location of gene expression during mouse development. The standardized text-based approach to integrate different types of gene expression information, to place these data into the larger biological context, and to make them thus readily accessible to many types of database searches is a key feature of the GXD. Here we describe the evolution of the mouse developmental anatomy ontology, the current utilities provided by the GXD, as well as broader current and future informatics frameworks for anatomy-based data integration.
