W736 NCBO Web Services and Development of Semantic Applications

Date: Saturday, January 14, 2012
Time: 11:45 AM
Room: Royal Palm Salon 5-6
Trish Whetzel , The National Center for Biomedical Ontology , CA
Nigam H. Shah , Stanford University, CA
Natalya F. Noy , Stanford University, CA
Michael Dorf , Stanford University, CA
Paul A. Alexander , Stanford University, CA
Ray Fergerson , Stanford University, CA
Mark A. Musen , Stanford University, CA
Researchers have turned to the Semantic Web to annotate and integrate disparate knowledge.  Ontologies provide the domain knowledge to drive these processes and the successful creation of semantic applications in the healthcare and life sciences require Web services that provide access to ontologies. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, a National Center for Biomedical Computing created under the NIH Roadmap, developed BioPortal, which provides access to one of the largest repositories of biomedical ontologies.  BioPortal is a Web-based system that serves as a repository for biomedical ontologies developed in OWL, OBO format, RRF, or Protégé frames.  The ontology content is programmatically accessible via a suite of Web services for use in applications, such as data annotation to natural language processing.  Features of BioPortal include mappings between ontologies, visualization of terms and relations, and the ability to comment on individual terms within an ontology. In addition, users can add information on projects that use ontologies and link these to ontologies in BioPortal as well as add reviews and ratings of ontologies.  BioPortal also serves as a gateway to search and integrate multiple biomedical resources such as PubMed abstracts, ClinicalTrials.gov, the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), and ArrayExpress by annotating these resources with ontology terms using the NCBO Annotator and then providing query access via the NCBO Resource Index.  The key functionality of the Resource Index is to enable users to locate biomedical data records within and across disparate resources bsaed on particular ontology concepts.