National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) Receives Funding through 2015

National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) Receives Funding through 2015
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced on October 20, 2010 that it has awarded to Stanford University School of Medicine a grant of $18.1 million to continue funding the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) through 2015. Founded in 2005, the goal of the NCBO is to innovate and lead the development of methods and tools that allow scientists and clinicians to put computer-stored knowledge to use in their everyday work to solve pressing biomedical problems. Ontologies are formal descriptions of application areas that allow both people and computers to reason about entities in the world and the relationships among those entities. Biomedical ontologies, for example, allow computers to use electronic patient record data to infer the condition of patients and to recommend treatment; they allow computers to reason about experimental results to help scientists to interpret their data.

The center will be led by Mark A. Musen, MD., PhD.,

Mark Musen MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics Research) and of Computer Science. Dr. Musen’s Stanford research group created Protégé, considered the most widely used ontology-development software in the world. “Since the founding of the NCBO in 2005, the importance of ontologies in biomedicine has skyrocketed,” Musen said. “Ontologies are now used routinely to annotate experimental data, to aid information retrieval, to enable integration of heterogeneous data sets, to drive text mining, and to build electronic knowledge bases. When the NCBO was established, it was clear that ontologies were important. Since that time, the use of ontologies has become essential in modern data analysis approaches.”
The NCBO has created the most comprehensive Web-based resource for biomedical ontologies—BioPortal—a Web site that receives thousands of visits each month. The NCBO’s Web services allow user programs to search the BioPortal ontologies, to traverse them, to find information about their components, and to use the ontologies to describe biomedical data in systematic machine-readable ways. Investigators around the world use these services every day to retrieve and analyze biomedical data in ways that simply were not possible before the advent of the NCBO. The NCBO has achieved its goals by building a partnership among outstanding performance sites at Stanford, the Mayo Clinic, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Victoria in Canada. In addition, John’s Hopkins, Harvard, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Medical College of Wisconsin will lead projects that use NCBO ontology services to address specific biomedical problems.

The next generation of NCBO technology will provide additional content and services for the broader community of biomedical, clinical, andtranslational researchers, with an emphasis on generalizability and wide-scale adoption. “We will close the gap between ontology authoring and ontology publishing,” Musen said. “We will explore the emergent phenomena that accrue from relating ontologies to one another and from linking them to online data biomedical resources. We will investigate the use of multiple ontologies to characterize, classify and analyze high-throughput data in novel ways as well as enable meaningful use of electronic patient records.”

Dr. Musen’s center is one of the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) funded by the NIH. The goal of these centers is to create a national infrastructure for the use of computers in biomedical research and patient care. More information about the NCBCs can be found at National Centers for Biomedical Computing. More information NCBO can be found at The National Center for Biomedical Ontology.