Community Profile for cBiO

Note that "cBio" is now formally referred to as "NCBO"

By / Date: Suzi Lewis / 2005.11.09

Last Updated:

• Community (name): GO, SO, and NCBO (cBiO)
• Date Established: 1998 (GO), 2002 (SO) and 2005 (cBiO)
• Key Stakeholders: NIH, Academic Institutions where the research is conducted
• Constituency: Genomic and Biomedical researchers
• Domain: Genetics, Genomics, and Biomedicine
• Mission / Charter: Advancing biomedicine with tools and methodologies for the structured organization of knowledge.
• With respect to Ontology work (esp. eGov-related work), the community's:
  • Medium Term Goal: Portal to biomedical ontologies and data
  • Short Term Goal: Phenotype annotation
  • Deliverables within the next 6 months: Open Biomedical Database and Phenote
• Key Differentiation (with the other communities presenting today): to be discussed (see "Additional Remarks" below)
• What we can bring to the table to foster collaboration with other communities here today: to be discussed (see "Additional Remarks" below)
• Additional Remarks: This was hard for me to do, because I'm not familiar with the other groups, so I can't say where we are different and where we are similar. ... What I can say is that all of the developments we are working on are supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with some additional support from the USDA, and the NSF. The NIH is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research, and our mission is to provide the necessary ontological framework that is essential for the full exploitation of this research. Biology has become an information driven science, large-scale functional studies are generating immense amounts of information, and new discoveries are driven by drawing inferences from what is known. Without a strong ontological foundation, biomedical research will be held back and progress slowed. Basically a traffic-jam of data. ... At some point we would naturally overlap with those coming from the clinical perspective (because of medical implications), and those from the environmental perspective (since environment is an essential component of any genetic expression) (--SuziLewis / 2005.11.09)
• Contact: Suzi Lewis (also Mark Musen on cBiO)