Biomedical Ontology in Action

In recent years, a good deal of attention has been paid to the sorts of criteria that an ontology must satisfy if it is to ensure true information integration and automatic reasoning across large-scale knowledge sources. Formal ontology is now an established field of research with conferences such as FOIS and organizations such as NCOR. The biomedical domain is at the leading edge of ontology research, as illustrated by the recent creation of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, a NIH Roadmap center.

Standing on the foundations of biomedical ontologies are the many applications supported by these ontologies. For example, in health care, ontologies are an important component of an interoperable health information technology infrastructure. In biology, ontologies have become essential for annotating the literature and integrating the multiple, heterogeneous knowledge bases resulting from the analysis of high-throughput experiments.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from a broad range of fields that are related to formal ontology and medical informatics. The goal is to show how current research can be brought to bear on the practical problems associated with the development of applications supported by these ontologies, i.e., to show biomedical ontology "in action".