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As new biomedical technologies are developed, the amount of publically available biomedical data continues to increase. To help manage these vast and disparate data sources, researchers have turned to the Semantic Web. Specifically, ontologies are used in data annotation, natural language processing, information retrieval, clinical decision support, and data integration tasks. The development of software applications to perform these tasks requires the integration of Web services to incorporate the wide variety of ontologies used in the health care and life sciences. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology, a National Center for Biomedical Computing created under the NIH Roadmap, developed BioPortal, which provides access to one of the largest repositories of biomedical ontologies. The NCBO Web services provide programmtic access to these ontologies and can be grouped into four categories; Ontology, Mapping, Annotation, and Data Access. The Ontology Web services provide access to ontologies, their metadata, ontology versions, downloads, navigation of the class hierarchy (parents, children, siblings) and details of each term. The Mapping Web services provide access to the millions of ontology mappings published in BioPortal. The NCBO Annotator Web service "tags" text automatically with terms from ontologies in BioPortal, and the NCBO Resource Index Web services provides access to an ontology-based index of public, online data resources. The NCBO Widgets package the Ontology Web services for use directly in Web sites. The functionality of the NCBO Web services and widgets are incorporated into semantically aware applications for ontology development and visualization, data annotation, and data integration. This overview will describe these classes of applications, discuss a few examples of each type, and which NCBO Web services are used by these applications.
Pubmed ID: 23734708 RIS Download
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Protege is a free, open-source platform that provides a growing user community with a suite of tools to construct domain models and knowledge-based applications with ontologies. At its core, Protege implements a rich set of knowledge-modeling structures and actions that support the creation, visualization, and manipulation of ontologies in various representation formats. Protege can be customized to provide domain-friendly support for creating knowledge models and entering data. Further, Protege can be extended by way of a plug-in architecture and a Java-based Application Programming Interface (API) for building knowledge-based tools and applications. An ontology describes the concepts and relationships that are important in a particular domain, providing a vocabulary for that domain as well as a computerized specification of the meaning of terms used in the vocabulary. Ontologies range from taxonomies and classifications, database schemas, to fully axiomatized theories. In recent years, ontologies have been adopted in many business and scientific communities as a way to share, reuse and process domain knowledge. Ontologies are now central to many applications such as scientific knowledge portals, information management and integration systems, electronic commerce, and semantic web services. The Protege platform supports two main ways of modeling ontologies: * The Protege-Frames editor enables users to build and populate ontologies that are frame-based, in accordance with the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity protocol (OKBC). In this model, an ontology consists of a set of classes organized in a subsumption hierarchy to represent a domain's salient concepts, a set of slots associated to classes to describe their properties and relationships, and a set of instances of those classes - individual exemplars of the concepts that hold specific values for their properties. * The Protege-OWL editor enables users to build ontologies for the Semantic Web, in particular in the W3C's Web Ontology Language (OWL). An OWL ontology may include descriptions of classes, properties and their instances. Given such an ontology, the OWL formal semantics specifies how to derive its logical consequences, i.e. facts not literally present in the ontology, but entailed by the semantics. These entailments may be based on a single document or multiple distributed documents that have been combined using defined OWL mechanisms (see the OWL Web Ontology Language Guide). Protege is based on Java, is extensible, and provides a plug-and-play environment that makes it a flexible base for rapid prototyping and application development.
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