The National Center for Biomedical Ontology

• Published in: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA 2012-03, Vol.19 (2), p.190-195
• Main Authors: Musen, Mark A, Noy, Natalya F, Shah, Nigam H, Whetzel, Patricia L, Chute, Christopher G, Story, Margaret-Anne, Smith, Barry
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Brief Communication; Forecasting; Goals; Medical Informatics; United States; User-Computer Interface; Vocabulary, Controlled
• ISSN: 1067-5027; 1527-974X
• DOI: 10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000523

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data.