National Center for Biomedical Ontology

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods designed to allow scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The Center's resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this biomedical information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects (DBPs) to enable their research and to stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center also undertakes outreach and educational activities to train the future generation of researchers in using biomedical ontologies and the Center's tools to enhance scientific discovery.

Goal of the Center
The goal of the Center is to support biomedical researchers in their knowledge-intensive work, by providing online tools and a Web portal enabling them to access, review, and integrate disparate information resources in all aspects of biomedical investigation and clinical practice. A major focus of their work involves the use of biomedical ontologies to aid in the management and analysis of data derived from complex experiments.

Participating Institutions

 * Stanford University
 * Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
 * University at Buffalo
 * Mayo Clinic
 * University of Cambridge
 * University of Oregon
 * University of California, San Francisco
 * University of Victoria

Organization of the Center
The Center is organized into six core components:
 * Core 1: Computer science research
 * Core 2: Bioinformatics research
 * Core 3: Driving biological projects and external research collaborations
 * Core 4: Infrastructure
 * Core 5: Education
 * Core 6: Dissemination

The computer-science research in Core 1 aims to deliver tools for accessing and unifying ontologies, and Core 2 will concentrate on creating tools for using these ontologies to annotate large biomedical data sets, enabling data-set analysis and integration.

The Center seeks to achieve its objectives by advancing standards of good practice and by creating tools and theories that support a wide range of driving biological projects and collaborative research activities, and by training computational biologists, specialists in informatics, and computer scientists in the use of ontologies and of the Center's technologies in support of their research.

Driving Biological Projects
Two Driving Biological Projects involve investigation of model-organism databases (Flybase and ZFIN), while the third involves analysis of data stored in TrialBank.

National Centers for Biomedical Computing
The Center is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is part of the network of National Centers for Biomedical Computing.