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    The ontology life cycle: Integrated tools for editing, publishing, peer review, and evolution of ontologies.
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    Abstract:
    Ontologies have become a critical component of many applications in biomedical informatics. However, the landscape of the ontology tools today is largely fragmented, with independent tools for ontology editing, publishing, and peer review: users develop an ontology in an ontology editor, such as Protégé; and publish it on a Web server or in an ontology library, such as BioPortal, in order to share it with the community; they use the tools provided by the library or mailing lists and bug trackers to collect feedback from users. In this paper, we present a set of tools that bring the ontology editing and publishing closer together, in an integrated platform for the entire ontology lifecycle. This integration streamlines the workflow for collaborative development and increases integration between the ontologies themselves through the reuse of terms.
    Keywords:
    Protégé
    Open Biomedical Ontologies
    Ontologies are now widely used in the biomedical domain. However, it is difficult to manipulate ontologies in a computer program and, consequently, it is not easy to integrate ontologies with databases or websites. Two main approaches have been proposed for accessing ontologies in a computer program: traditional API (Application Programming Interface) and ontology-oriented programming, either static or dynamic. In this paper, we will review these approaches and discuss their appropriateness for biomedical ontologies. We will also present an experience feedback about the integration of an ontology in a computer software during the VIIIP research project. Finally, we will present OwlReady, the solution we developed.
    IDEF5
    Open Biomedical Ontologies
    Interface (matter)
    Ontology components
    Application programming interface
    Reuse of ontologies is important for achieving better interoperability among health systems and relieving knowledge engineers from the burden of developing ontologies from scratch. Most of the work that aims to facilitate ontology reuse has focused on building ontology libraries that are simple repositories of ontologies or has led to keyword-based search tools that search among ontologies. To our knowledge, there are no operational methodologies that allow users to evaluate ontologies and to compare them in order to choose the most appropriate ontology for their task. In this paper, we present, Knowledge Zone - a Web-based portal that allows users to submit their ontologies, to associate metadata with their ontologies, to search for existing ontologies, to find ontology rankings based on user reviews, to post their own reviews, and to rate reviews.
    IDEF5
    Open Biomedical Ontologies
    Ontology components
    Citations (5)
    The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (http://bioontology.org) is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists funded by the NIH Roadmap to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are: (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. The Center is working toward these objectives by providing tools to develop ontologies and to annotate experimental data, and by developing resources to integrate and relate existing ontologies as well as by creating repositories of biomedical data that are annotated using those ontologies. The Center is providing training workshops in ontology design, development, and usage, and is also pursuing research in ontology evaluation, quality, and use of ontologies to promote scientific discovery. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease.
    Biomedicine
    Open Biomedical Ontologies
    Citations (1)
    The information explosion in biology makes it difficult for researchers to stay abreast of current biomedical knowledge and to make sense of the massive amounts of online information. Ontologies—specifications of the entities, their attributes and relationships among the entities in a domain of discourse—are increasingly enabling biomedical researchers to accomplish these tasks. In fact, bio-ontologies are beginning to proliferate in step with accruing biological data. The myriad of ontologies being created enables researchers not only to solve some of the problems in handling the data explosion but also introduces new challenges. One of the key difficulties in realizing the full potential of ontologies in biomedical research is the isolation of various communities involved: some workers spend their career developing ontologies and ontology-related tools, while few researchers (biologists and physicians) know how ontologies can accelerate their research. The objective of this review is to give an overview of biomedical ontology in practical terms by providing a functional perspective—describing how bio-ontologies can and are being used. As biomedical scientists begin to recognize the many different ways ontologies enable biomedical research, they will drive the emergence of new computer applications that will help them exploit the wealth of research data now at their fingertips.
    Open Biomedical Ontologies
    IDEF5
    Isolation
    Citations (287)
    The increasing need for interdisciplinary team sciences makes it vital for academic research departments to publicize their research and educational resources as part of "linked data" on the semantic web to facilitate research networking and recruitment. We extended an open-source ontology, VIVO, to represent the research and educational resources in an academic biomedical informatics department to enable ontology-based information storage and retrieval. Using participatory design methods, we surveyed representative types of visitors to the department web site to understand their information needs, and incorporated these needs into the ontology design. We added 114 classes and 186 properties to VIVO. Generalizability and scalability are the measures used in our theoretical evaluation.
    Citations (0)
    Background. Prot6ge-2000 is the latest in a series of tools developed in our laboratory to assist developers in the construction of large electronic knowledge bases [1]. The direct-manipulation user interface allows developers to create and edit domain ontologies that represent the salient concepts and relationships among concepts in an application area. From the ontology, the system automatically constructs a graphical knowledge-acquisition system that allows application specialists to enter the content knowledge required for specific applications.
    Protégé
    Knowledge Acquisition
    Plug-in
    Citations (8)