use cases

Hello everyone,
As promised, here is a brief summary of use cases that I discussed on 
the recent tcon:

1. Ontology of Biomedical Investigation (OBI)--this is community of 
biomedical researchers who are creating an upper level ontology to 
cover all forms of biomedical investigation, plus low-level 
description of biomedical experiments, instruments, and measurements. 
They have need to represent common metadata for each class, and 
recently have decided to go with the work from the MSI group:
https://www.cbil.upenn.edu/obiwiki/index.php/RepresentationalUnitMetadataTable
They are considering using SKOS, depending on if it can meet their 
needs for terminological representation.

2. RadLex--this is a large lexicon for the field of medical imaging. 
Right now it is accessible on the Web via a custom browser 
(http://mirc.rsna.org/radlex/service) but soon will be released in 
OWL. This group is interested in considering using standards for 
terminology representation that would support standard metdata such 
as definition, synonym, subsumption relations, and provenance information.

3. BIRN--The Biomedical Informatics Research Network is creating a 
terminology called BirnLex 
(http://132.239.132.249:8080/xwiki/bin/view/+BIRN-OTF-Public/Home) to 
describe experiements and results related to neurobiological 
investigation. Their need is to make BirnLex publicly available and 
shareable and to represent metadata, similar to OBI (see #1). In 
addition, they use terms from BirnLex to *annotate* experimental 
data. Whether SKOS might be useful to represent an annotation (which 
is basically a composed set of ontology terms) might be interesting 
to explore as well.

4. NCBO Open Biomedical Ontologies (http://bioontology.org). NCBO 
will be releasing (within 1-2 months) a Web portal to a library of 
ontologies called BioPortal. The BioPortal unifies a diversity of 
ontologies and makes them publicly available on the Web. It will also 
be capable of converting among ontology formats into a common format 
such as OWL. The need is to provide a means for different ontologies 
to be integrated and accessible (and referenced by a common URI 
mechanism which BioPortal will provide).  One possibility would be 
for these converted formats to be SKOS compliant.

Regards,
Daniel

Received on Tuesday, 21 November 2006 06:49:26 UTC