Re: National Center for Biomedical Ontology

Mark,

A very warm congratulations to you on having the National Center for Biomedical Ontology awarded! I believe as you do that the Semantic Web community will want to work together closely with your initiative as it progresses.

As we begin to outline our activities for semantic web life science infrastructure and applications over the next few years, we will need to collaborate with key centers such as yours. I also hope we can help contribute to your efforts with some insights and best practices that will arise from discussions in the Semantic Web Healthcare and Life Sciencess Interest Group (HCLSIG).

I and others in the SW community look forwards to working with you and the center, and hope to establish some channels in the coming months for activities that will benefit both initiatives!

best regards,
Eric

--- Mark Musen <musen@stanford.edu> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
>