Core 5

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

Education of trainees and dissemination to the broader biomedical community are highly interrelated tasks. Our dissemination goal is to educate our colleagues in the biomedical community about the use of ontology-oriented tools in general and about the Center's technology in particular. NCBO differs from other current NCBCs because our computational technology is only as useful as the ontological content that our technology supports. NCBO thus has a special obligation to promote the construction of useful, reliable, scalable, and easily maintainable ontologies, which are at the same time biologically accurate. The NCBO seeks to transform the work of developing and using biomedical ontologies into an enterprise that is supported by computational tools that allow biomedical researchers to capture the benefits of instantaneous global collaboration made possible through the Web. Our dissemination efforts thus concentrate both on making technology available in ways that allow users to gain access to ontologies and to other formal representations of biomedical knowledge, and on assisting the community in building ontologies that are well-structured, coherently integrated, and useful to biomedical researchers. The latter is achieved by promoting maximally effective retrieval, integration, and exploitation of data and information.