The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians,
biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health
(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. 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.
This paper is part of the special issue of OMICS on data standards.
