Annotator Web service

To automatically process a piece of data text to annotate it with relevant ontology concepts and return the annotations.

Presentation & Demonstration

The range of publicly available biomedical data is enormous and continues to rapidly expand. This expansion means that researchers now face a hurdle to extracting the data they need from the large numbers of data that are available. Biomedical researchers have turned to ontologies and terminologies to structure and annotate their data with ontology concepts for better search and retrieval. However, this annotation process cannot be easily automated and often requires expert curators. Plus, there is a lack of easy-to-use systems that facilitate the use of ontologies for annotation. The NCBO Annotator (formerly referred to as the Open Biomedical Annotator (OBA)) is an ontology-based Web service that annotates public datasets with biomedical ontology concepts based on their textual metadata. The biomedical community can use the annotator service to tag thier data automatically with ontology concepts. These concepts come from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal ontologies. Such annotations facilitate translational discoveries by integrating annotated data.

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NCBO Annotator Web service workflow

Please try the NCBO Annotator service in BioPortal.

Contacts

• For questions or feature requests, contact Support

Documentation & References

• Annotator REST Web Service User Guide Annotator User Guide

• Annotator REST Web Service client examples Annotator Client Examples. The sample code includes both Perl and Java examples.

• Please refer to:
  • Clement Jonquet, Nigam H. Shah, Mark A. Musen, The Open Biomedical Annotator, AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, p. 56-60, March 2009, San Francisco, CA, USA. conference's web site pdf - 201Kb

Versions (prototypes & releases)

• November 2009 - Second prototype including Mmtx: [1]

• April 2009 - First production release in BioPortal 2.1

• March 2009 - Prototype user interface has been deployed on the BioPortal staging server.

• October 2008 - The prototype (v1.1) has bee released for testing and evaluation. The prototype is still available but please don't use it anymore: [2]

• May 2008 - First prototype (v1.0) - Has been removed from servers.

Community

After eight months of existence the NCBO Annotator counts already eight academic groups including UCSF, University of Indiana and the Jackson Laboratory that use and experiment the service in specific scenarios. Internally, we have used the annotation workflow to index biomedical data resources with ontology concepts (cf. Resource_Index).

Learn more about NCBO Annotator users & use cases: NCBO Annotator community

Collaboration & Acknowledgment

• The NCBO Annotator service uses Mgrep in the concept recognition step. We acknowledge the assistance of Manhong Dai and Fan Meng from the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI).

• The user interface for the Annotator client in BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org/annotate) is designed & developed by NCBO members from University of Victoria