NLM DIR Seminar Schedule

Abstract:

Ontologies have played a critical role in the last 25 years in knowledge representation, data indexing and retrieval, and data integration. Projects like the Gene Ontology and the Human Phenotype Ontology, coordinated through the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry, demonstrate the ability to encode knowledge in a computable format and link it to external sources of knowledge from other domains at scale. As the volume of data used in biomedical experiments grows, efforts to improve data stewardship, such as the FAIR principles, have identified ontologies as a key tool for making data and metadata machine actionable. In parallel with this are efforts to produce computable knowledge, defined as knowledge that is explicitly represented such that it can be parsed and reasoned upon using computational methods to derive new knowledge, and represent it in resource like knowledge graphs. In this presentation, I provide background on what ontologies are and how they are used, and introduce the Cell Knowledge Network—a DIR-funded knowledge network designed to connect data and knowledge about cell phenotypes to knowledge about anatomy, drug targets, human phenotypes and disease, and other domains.