Initiative in Innovative Computing @ Harvard

Seminar Series

Wednesday, May 2, 2007; 4:00pm

Mark Musen, Ph.D. Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and Computer Science, Stanford University

Seminar Title: The Craze over Bio-Ontologies

Abstract

In the past decade, there has been an explosion in the use of formal ontologies to enumerate and categorize the entities in scientific disciplines. This trend is particularly palpable in biology, where an avalanche of available data requires new technologies for search, integration, and analysis. Work in biomedical ontology has largely been stimulated from the ground up, where the pressing needs of small groups of scientists have spawned a large cottage industry of pragmatic ontology developers. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the seven national centers for biomedical computing recently created under the NIH Roadmap, has been created to help move this cottage industry into the industrial age. In this talk, I will discuss the rise of ontologies in biology in the context of e-science, the challenges of organizing the cottage industry into a coherent work force, and some of the opportunities afforded by the representation and dissemination of scientific knowledge in machine-processable form.

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