National Center for Biomedical Ontology

Folks,

I know that this could be construed as a shameless plug, but I  
thought that this community would want to know that one of this  
year's National Centers for Biomedical Computing just announced under  
the Roadmap initiative of the NIH will be "The National Center for  
Biomedical Ontology" (see http://www.bioontology.org).

The Center has been founded by a consortium that brings together the  
Protégé group at Stanford, the informatics team of the Gene Ontology  
Consortium centered at Berkeley, the informatics group at the Mayo  
Clinic responsible for the Common Terminology Services standard  
promoted by HL7, the ontology group in the Department of Philosophy  
at SUNY-Buffalo, and several other collaborating centers.  Together,  
we will develop new technology for managing libraries of biomedical  
ontologies, for indexing, aligning, and annotating biomedical  
ontologies, and for facilitating peer review of online knowledge  
resources in both clinical medicine and the life sciences.  We also  
plan to develop technology to help biologists to use ontologies,  
primarily in the area of annotating large data sets.  We are planning  
outreach activities to help biomedical scientists in the development  
and refinement of ontologies in particular domains.

The NIH roadmap initiative includes set-aside funds to encourage  
investigators at other institutions to collaborate with the National  
Centers for Biomedical Computation (see http://www.bisti.nih.gov/ncbc/ 
index.cfm and http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/ 
PAR-05-063.html).  This grant mechanism might provide a very tangible  
way to fund projects related to the Semantic Web in the life sciences.

Needless to say, all of us involved in the creation of the Center are  
very excited both to have received this funding from the NIH and to  
be able to develop new collaborative ties that may be supported by  
the NIH Roadmap.  As our Center is just getting started, we certainly  
would welcome suggestions from the group regarding how the Center  
might play a facilitating role for the Semantic Web community apart  
from the collaborative-grant opportunity.

Mark

Received on Sunday, 2 October 2005 03:36:11 UTC