The National Center for Biomedical Ontology

Mark A. Musen,1 Natasha F. Noy,1 Nigam H. Shah,1 Christopher G. Chute,2 Margaret-Anne Storey,3 Barry Smith,4 and the NCBO team

 

1Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA
2Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN USA
3Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC Canada
4Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY USA

  

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; to build tools and Web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; to educate our trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and to collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the NCBO is a Web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world’s biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of Web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data.