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The goal of the National Center for Ontological Research is to advance ontological investigation within the United States. NCOR serves as a vehicle to coordinate, to enhance, to publicize, and to seek funding for ontological research activities. It lays a special focus on ontology training and on the establishment of tools and measures for quality assurance of ontologies. NCOR provides ontology services to multiple organizations, including the US Department of Defense.

Events

The ImmPort Portal: A Guide for Submitters

Date: October 9-10, 2013 Venue: Rho Federal Systems Division,

6330 Quadrangle Dr. Suite 500,

Chapel Hill, NC 27517

Goals: The goals of this meeting are: to provide assistance to actual and potential submitters of data to ImmPort; to enable interaction between submitters and those charged with managing and improving ImmPort in order to identify problems and opportunities for improvement

Day 1: Wednesday, October 9

8:00 Breakfast

8:45 Barry Smith (ImmPort / University at Buffalo): A Practical Introduction to ImmPort and to NIH Mandates for Data Sharing and Reuse

-- overview of the goals of ImmPort

-- role of standards and ontologies (1) for data submission (2) for data reuse

-- successes and failures

10:00 Break

10:30 Barry Smith (continued)

Brainstorming on

-- existing data management strategies and software tools to enhance

data submission

-- potential future avenues for collecting data

-- how to make your data discoverable

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Jeff Wiser (ImmPort / Northrop Grumman): Training session on Submitting Data to ImmPort

-- overview

-- the need to grow ImmPort's clinical submission area

14:30 Break

15:00 Jeff Wiser (continued) Brainstorming on

-- identifying pain points in submission

-- new software developed to aid submission

Evening: Dinner

Day 2: Thursday, October 9

8:00 Breakfast

8:30 Barry Smith: Initiating a consensus process for creating useful and usable standards

9:00 Tasking of break-out groups

-- primary need: the standards should enhance ImmPort submission

process and guarantee discoverability

-- secondary needs: the standards should be easy to use by ImmPort

submitters, and should be recommended for incorporation into data management resources; be compatible with or derived from existing standards

9:15 Break-Out Groups (possible areas):

allergy

asthma

transplantation

diabetes and auto-immune diseases

CDISC / FDA-related standards (if needed)

Each break-out group would

-- review existing data standards in these areas

-- identify needs for data standards in these areas

11:45 Report back and decide on next steps 12:30 Lunch / Close

Studying Ontology in Buffalo

Areas of Study

Careers in ontology

News

Advantages of the Financial Report Ontology in Accounting Research

UB Ontologists Win Bioinformatics Integration Award to Support National Institutes of Health

Announcing Clinical and Translational Science Ontology Affinity Group

Information Overload in the Era of Big Data

Botanists building ontologies to cope with information overload

UB Applied Informatics Portal unveiled.

Tutorials and Courses

How to Develop and Use OBO Foundry Ontologies, Tutorial and Workshop at ICBO, Graz, Austria, July 21, 2012

Basic Formal Ontology 2.0: Tutorial at ICBO/FOIS, Graz, Austria, July 25, 2012

Introduction to Protégé, Tutorial, Buffalo, NY, August 11-12, 2012

Basic Formal Ontology 2.0, Tutorial, Buffalo, NY, August 18-19, 2012

Problems in Ontology, Class, Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-6pm, August 29 - December 5, 2012

Ontological Engineering, Class, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University at Buffalo, NY, Mondays from 4-7pm, August 26 - December 2, 2013

Defining Ontology

An ontology is a representation of some part of reality, (e.g. medicine, social reality, physics, etc.). Smith states that: “Ontology is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality…Ontology seeks to provide a definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being.”1 To be an accurate representation of reality an ontology includes the types of entities and events in a given domain (along with their definitions) arranged in a hierarchical structure, along with relations (such as part-of, depends-on, caused-by, etc. where necessary). Ontologies enable the formulation of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain by providing a common controlled vocabulary for doctrine writers, IT Developers, and war-fighters alike, thereby allowing these disparate communities to communicate with each other. An ontology should be a shared resource between communities, and its continued collaborative development should support the integration of information and facilitate knowledge discovery.2 These two goals are realized by ensuring wide dissemination of the ontology, so that it will be used by many stakeholders, and its terms will be correspondingly familiar and readily used for search.

Documents

Semantic Enhancement for DSGS-A: Distributed Development of a Shared Semantic Resource

Suggested Reading

Ontology: An Introduction

Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies

Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos

Universal Core Semantic Layer

Training Videos

Ontology for Intelligence, Defense and Security

A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development

Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability

War-Fighter Ontology