Current status of ontologies in Biomedical and Clinical Informatics

It is becoming an impossible task for managing research data in the field of biomedical and clinical informatics. These huge data sets cannot manually be analyzed, interpreted or processed to acquire inferred knowledge efficiently. We need intelligent agents or computer systems to help us in doing these tasks and hence it becomes mandatory to represent medical knowledge in computer process able format. Semantic technology and ontology can be used to partial solve the data management problem in medical informatics. Semantic knowledge representation allows the intelligent agents or computers to interpret the data and acquire inferred knowledge. Hence, 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. In this paper we will discuss the role of ontologies in representing medical informatics. First, we will talk about the principles of ontologies and few examples. Next we will study some fully developed biomedical ontologies and their differences. Finally, we study the applications of ontologies in biomedical research. Terms: Ontology, biomedical ontologies, medical informatics, clinical informatics, clinical decision support systems, knowledge representation, patient health record (PHR), clinical trials, Protégé, SNOMED-CT, GALEN, Gene Ontology (GO), Ontology integration, Ontology Mapping, NCodes.