Talking welfare: the importance of a common language

Ontologies describing mouse phenotypes and pathology are well established and becoming more universally used (Smith and Eppig in Mamm Genome 23:653, 2012; Scofield et al. in J Biomed Semant 4:18, 2013). However, the language used to describe and disseminate cage-side observations is less well developed. This article explores the hurdles to unifying a language and terminology, and introduces our initial attempt to do so.