The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is one of the National Centers for Biomedical Computing, and is funded by the NIH. Among the goals of the NCBO are to provide tools for discovery and access of biomedical ontologies, which are a type of controlled vocabulary designed to allow the expression of complex relationships in machine-readable form. [1]
The NCBO has facilities at Stanford University, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Victoria, and the University at Buffalo. [2]
Among the products associated with the NCBO are the Open Biomedical Ontologies. [3]
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.
The Gene Ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and gene product attributes; 2) annotate genes and gene products, and assimilate and disseminate annotation data; and 3) provide tools for easy access to all aspects of the data provided by the project, and to enable functional interpretation of experimental data using the GO, for example via enrichment analysis. GO is part of a larger classification effort, the Open Biomedical Ontologies, being one of the Initial Candidate Members of the OBO Foundry.
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure among these vocabularies and thus allows one to translate among the various terminology systems; it may also be viewed as a comprehensive thesaurus and ontology of biomedical concepts. UMLS further provides facilities for natural language processing. It is intended to be used mainly by developers of systems in medical informatics.
The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry is a group of people dedicated to build and maintain ontologies related to the life sciences. The OBO Foundry establishes a set of principles for ontology development for creating a suite of interoperable reference ontologies in the biomedical domain. Currently, there are more than a hundred ontologies that follow the OBO Foundry principles.
Robert David Stevens is a professor of bio-health informatics. and Head of Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester
Gerald Mayer Rubin is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Related to his genomics work, Rubin's lab is notable for development of genetic and genomics tools and studies of signal transduction and gene regulation. Rubin also serves as a vice president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and executive director of the Janelia Research Campus.
A Biositemap is a way for a biomedical research institution of organisation to show how biological information is distributed throughout their Information Technology systems and networks. This information may be shared with other organisations and researchers.
The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an open-access, integrated ontology for the description of biological and clinical investigations. OBI provides a model for the design of an investigation, the protocols and instrumentation used, the materials used, the data generated and the type of analysis performed on it. The project is being developed as part of the OBO Foundry and as such adheres to all the principles therein such as orthogonal coverage and the use of a common formal language. In OBI the common formal language used is the Web Ontology Language (OWL). As of March 2008, a pre-release version of the ontology was made available at the project's SVN repository.
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.
Lawrence E. Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computational biology, which led to the genesis of the major professional organization in the field and two international conferences.
The National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) is one of seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing funded by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research. The center is based at the University of Michigan and is part of the Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. NCIBI's mission is to create targeted knowledge environments for molecular biomedical research to help guide experiments and enable new insights from the analysis of complex diseases. It was established in October 2005.
Monocarboxylate transporter 9 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SLC16A9 gene.
Suzanna (Suzi) E. Lewis was a scientist and Principal investigator at the Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until her retirement in 2019. Lewis led the development of open standards and software for genome annotation and ontologies.
The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a formal ontology of human phenotypes. Developed in collaboration with members of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry, HPO currently contains over 13,000 terms and over 156,000 annotations to hereditary diseases. Data from Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man and medical literature were used to generate the terms currently in the HPO. The ontology contains over 50,000 annotations between phenotypes and hereditary disease.
Experimental factor ontology, also known as EFO, is an open-access ontology of experimental variables particularly those used in molecular biology. The ontology covers variables which include aspects of disease, anatomy, cell type, cell lines, chemical compounds and assay information. EFO is developed and maintained at the EMBL-EBI as a cross-cutting resource for the purposes of curation, querying and data integration in resources such as Ensembl, ChEMBL and Expression Atlas.
Cathy H. Wu is the Edward G. Jefferson Chair and professor and director of the Center for Bioinformatics & Computational Biology (CBCB) at the University of Delaware. She is also the director of the Protein Information Resource (PIR) and the North east Bioinformatics Collaborative Steering Committee, and the adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Judith Anne Blake is a computational biologist at the Jackson Laboratory and Professor of Mammalian Genetics.
Biocuration is the field of life sciences dedicated to organizing biomedical data, information and knowledge into structured formats, such as spreadsheets, tables and knowledge graphs. The biocuration of biomedical knowledge is made possible by the cooperative work of biocurators, software developers and bioinformaticians and is at the base of the work of biological databases.
The Cell Ontology is an ontology that aims at capturing the diversity of cell types in animals. It is part of the Open Biomedical and Biological Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The Cell Ontology identifiers and organizational structure are used to annotate data at the level of cell types, for example in single-cell RNA-seq studies. It is one important resource in the construction of the Human Cell Atlas.