Dissemination

For more information on dissemination activities, please see Dissemination Wiki.

Outreach Activities To The Scientific Community

Building on our practical experience in creating important biomedical ontology resources, and on our world-class expertise in philosophy, knowledge representation, informatics, and ontology-related software development, our Center is disseminating its technology by working closely with our colleagues in clinical medicine and in the life sciences who themselves are engaged in the modeling of biomedical content.

A novel aspect of our dissemination plan is the institution of frequent, formal workshops to help investigators at the grass roots to design biomedical ontologies of more utility and of more lasting value. These workshops are part of a general endeavor to establish and test best practices in ontology-building and to disseminate these practices across an ever wider community in ways designed to assure comparability of data.

Dr. Barry Smith at the University at Buffalo has primary responsibility for the ontology dissemination work of the Center.

We are undertaking a number of projects in ontology dissemination:

1. We are offering training workshops during which experts in ontology development from our Center work directly with biomedical scientists in using our Center’s methods and technologies, allowing them to gain hands-on experience in developing specific biomedical ontologies and in evaluating the results of their work.
2. We are maintaining active relationships with professional societies, government laboratories, and academic groups who are developing biomedical ontologies.
3. We provide Internet resources for discussion, critique, and improvement of existing biological ontologies, ontology tools, and access to the Center’s methodology for ontology evaluation. See our suggested reading on ontology evaluation methods.