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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
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
Past Events
Studying Ontology in Buffalo
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
Coordinated Evolution of Biomedical Ontologies
Avoiding Perspective-Relative Silos
Training Videos
Ontology for Intelligence, Defense and Security
A Repeatable Process for Ontology Development
Avoiding Semantic Stovepipes: Five Ontological Principles for Interoperability
