National Center for Biomedical Ontology

National Center for Biomedical Ontology

Center URL: http://www.bioontology.org/
PI: Mark A. Musen, M.D., Ph.D.
PI Institution: Stanford University

NIH Program Officer (PO): Peter Good, Ph.D. (NHGRI)
NIH Lead Science Officer (LSO): Peter Lyster (NIGMS)
NIH Science Officers (SO): Arthur Castle (NIDDK), German Cavelier (NIMH), Sherri De Coronado (NCI), Jennie E. Larkin (NHLBI), Jerry Li (NCI), Peter Lyster (NIGMS), Peter Preusch (NIGMS), Krzysztof Ptak (NINDS), Karen Skinner (NIDA), Ram D. Sriram (NIST), Ashley Xia (NIAID)

ID: 1-U54-HG004028-01

NCBO Summary: The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The vision for the NCBO is that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that the knowledge and data are semantically interoperable and useful for furthering biomedical science and clinical care. The Center’s resources include: the BioPortal, a web portal for accessing, visualizing, and biomedical ontologies; an integrated Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library; and tools for accessing and using this biomedical information in research. The NCBO collaborates with Driving Biological Projects that involve the development and use of ontologies to annotate different types of biomedical information and to extract additional knowledge from this data. A key component of the NCBO is the dissemination plan to institute frequent, formal workshops to help investigators at the grass roots to design biomedical ontologies of more utility and of more lasting value. These workshops are part of a general endeavor to establish and test best practices in ontology-building and to disseminate these practices across an ever wider community in ways designed to assure comparability of data.