BioPortal 2.5 Released

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is pleased to announce the
release of *BioPortal 2.5*, a Web-based platform for browsing, visualizing,
mapping, and commenting on biomedical ontologies and terminologies.  Our new
release of BioPortal includes many new features, Web services, and bug
fixes.  BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org) is a comprehensive
repository of biomedical ontologies that enables users to access and share
ontologies that are actively used in biomedical communities. Users can
publish their ontologies in BioPortal, link ontologies to each other, review
ontologies and comment on specific terms, list projects that use ontologies,
annotate textual metadata with ontologies, and use Web services to
incorporate ontologies or their components into their software applications.

Major new features in this release include the following:

-       Support for *structured notes and term requests*: Users can now use
BioPortal to request that content developers add new terms.  BioPortal
provides a structured template for making such requests, allowing users to
suggest preferred names, synonyms, and definitions for the requested terms.
BioPortal stores the requests as structured notes that are attached to the
ontology and that other ontology tools, such as Protégé, will be able to
use.

-       Support for *email notifications* to interested parties whenever a
BioPortal user creates new notes for an ontology of interest. (If you would
like to subscribe to notifications about a particular ontology, please send
email to support@bioontology.org.  We will have an interactive form to
sign-up for notifications shortly.)

-       A set of prototype Web services to generate *RDF representation for
terms* in ontologies in BioPortal (see documentation [1] for details).

-       A prototype end-point for SPARQL access to all ontologies in
BioPortal: http://sparql.bioontology.org

-       A set of Web services for retrieving instance information for OWL
ontologies [1]. We are planning to release a user interface for viewing
instances shortly.

-       New ontology widgets that developers can embed on their Web sites,
including an *ontology tree widget* that allows Web-site authors to present
a display of an ontology or an ontology subtree for any BioPortal ontology
in any Web page.

-       A preview release of *Bio-Mixer*, a mashup tool that provides
extremely flexible browsing and exploration of ontologies and their mappings

 [1] http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/NCBO_REST_services




Trish Whetzel, PhD
Outreach Coordinator
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology
Ph: 650-721-2378
whetzel@stanford.edu
http://www.bioontology.org