NCBO releases services and widgets to deploy in users web sites and applications

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is pleased to announce the
release of several services and widgets that will enable users to include
the NCBO technologies on their own web sites and in their applications.
Please see the following page for details:

http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/Using_NCBO_Technology_In_Your_Project



Specifically, we have released:

*Ontology Web Services: *All the content that the NCBO BioPortal uses (and
more!) is available via REST services. You can use the NCBO REST Services:

            • to access all BioPortal ontologies, their different versions,
and metadata for those versions

            • to access information about any ontology concept in BioPortal
(its definition, synonyms, and other properties)

            • to search across all ontologies in BioPortal

            • to get hierarchy information for BioPortal ontologies (such as
parents, children, or siblings of a class, roots or leaves of a class
hierarchy)



*Annotator Web Service: *A service that identifies mentions of biomedical
ontology concepts in text that users submit. You can use the annotator
service to tag automatically any item of interest with terms from UMLS and
BioPortal ontologies.

*Ontology Widgets: *Put elements of BioPortal, custom-tailored for your
ontology of interest, on your own Web site or in your Web form. To add these
widgets, you need only to copy simple HTML or Javascript code to your own
Web page (go to the "Ontology Widgets" tab on the page for individual
ontology details to get the code pre-configured for the widgets using your
ontology of interest).  The main kinds of widgets you get are:

            • *Term-selection field on a form*: You can add a text field to
your Web form that will let users enter a term from a controlled vocabulary
(e.g., terms from a single ontology)

            • *Ontology search widget*: You can add to your Web site a
search box that searches a specific BioPortal ontology. When the user
selects the term of interest (with the help of the look-ahead feature), he
can jump to the BioPortal page for the corresponding concept in BioPortal.

            • *Track updates (RSS Feed widget)*: you can put a widget on
your site that will have a live feed of all the changes to your ontology of
interest, such as uploads of a new version, comments from other users, new
mappings for concepts in your ontology.

            • *Ontology visualization widget*: You can put a widget on your
Web site that visualizes your entire ontology of interest, or some part of
it, as on the "Visualize" tab in BioPortal.