Biomedical ontologies: a functional perspective

Biomedical ontologies: a functional perspective

The information explosion in biology makes it difficult for researchers to stay abreast of current biomedical knowledge and to make sense of the massive amounts of online information. Ontologies--specifications of the entities, their attributes and relationships among the entities in a domain of discourse--are increasingly enabling biomedical researchers to accomplish these tasks. In fact, bio-...

The role of ontologies in biological and biomedical research: a functional perspective

Ontologies are widely used in biological and biomedical research. Their success lies in their combination of four main features present in almost all ontologies: provision of standard identifiers for classes and relations that represent the phenomena within a domain; provision of a vocabulary for a domain; provision of metadata that describes the intended meaning of the classes and relations in...

Biomedical ontologies.

Biomedical ontologies provide an organizational framework of the concepts involved in biological entities and processes in a system of hierarchical and associative relations that allows reasoning about biomedical knowledge. In contrast, biomedical terminologies promote a standard way of naming these concepts. Differences among various kinds of terminological systems can be briefly summarized as...

Chapter #2.5 BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGIES

Ontology design is an important aspect of medical informatics, and reusability is a key issue that is determined by the level of compatibility among ontology concepts and among the theories of the biomedical domain they convey. In this article, we examine OpenGALEN, the UMLS Semantic Network, SNOMED CT, the Foundational Model of Anatomy, and the MENELAS ontology as well as descriptions of the b...

Session Introduction: Biomedical Ontologies