The National Center for Biomedical Ontology

J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2012 Mar-Apr;19(2):190-5. doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000523. Epub 2011 Nov 10.

Abstract

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Forecasting
  • Goals
  • Medical Informatics*
  • United States
  • User-Computer Interface
  • Vocabulary, Controlled*