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The National Center for Ontological Research
Welcome to the Collaboration Platform of NCOR, the National Center for Ontological Research.
To submit content please write to ontology@buffalo.edu.
Inaugural Event
NCOR's inaugural event was held in Buffalo on October 27, 2005. Details of the event, including presentations, photographs and a list of attendees, are available here:[1]. A video webcast of the event will be posted shortly.
Presentations from the associated October 28 workshop on Bio-Ontologies are available here:[2].
Newsletters
See here
Mission Statement and Statutes
The goal of NCOR is to promote the application of scientific methods in ontology research in the United States
by establishing cross-disciplinary networks among those individuals and groups involved in ontological research and applications in such a way as to foster a high degree of interaction at the four levels of infrastructure, content, methodology and application
by fostering, through challenge evaluations and other methodologies, objective measures for the quality (usefulness, useability, reliability ...) of ontologies
by developing, testing and promoting best practices in ontology research and development, including conformity to reference ontologies and to top-level integration ontologies
by developing partnerships with institutions in academia, industry and government designed to enable the sharing of expertise and to consolidate best practices
by organizing and strengthening educational and training programs in ontology
by organizing outreach programs designed to promote greater public awareness of the importance of high-level ontology research.
The Statutes of NCOR are posted here:[3]
Directors and Executive Committee
The Directors of NCOR are responsible for day-to-day management; the Executive Committee will provide advice and assistance to the Directors.
Directors are Barry Smith (Buffalo) and Mark Musen (Stanford). The following persons have been elected to serve on the NCOR Executive Committee:
William Andersen (Ontology Works Inc.)
Louis Goldberg (Buffalo)
Suzanna Lewis (Berkeley)
Chris Menzel (Boeing Corporation and Texas AandM University)
Brand Niemann (EPA)
Leo Obrst (MITRE)
Scientific Committee
NCOR's Scientific Committee is responsible for setting long-term goals of NCOR and for the selection of partners. It consists of the Directors, the Executive Committee, together with the following persons:
Judith Blake, Mouse Genome Informatics, The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, MN
Olivier Bodenreider, National Library of Medicine: Medical Ontology Research, Bethesda, MD
Jack Bowie, Apelon Inc., Ridgefield, CT
Gary Byrd, Health Sciences Library, University at Buffalo
Patrick Cassidy, The MITRE Corp., Eatontown, NJ
Daniel Cook, Structural Informatics Group, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Mills Davis, TopQuadrant Inc., Project 10X, Beaver Falls, PA
Susan Golden Nervana, Inc., Bellevue, WA
Frank Hartel, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
David Hill, Mouse Genome Informatics, The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME
Clarence Huf, Sierra Nevada Corp. Intelligence Program, San Antonio, TX
Todd Hughes, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, Cherry Hill, NJ
Kathy Lesh, The KEVRIC Company, Inc., Hyattsville, MD
James Llinas, Center for Multisource Information Fusion, University at Buffalo
Inderjeet Mani, The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
David Mark, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University at Buffalo
Robin A. McEntire, GlaxoSmithKline, King of Prussia, PA
J. L. V. Mejino, Structural Informatics Group, Department of Biological Structure, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA
H. Raghav Rao, Management Science and Systems, School of Management; Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo
Steven Ray, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Stuart C. Shapiro, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Buffalo
Simon Twigger, Rat Genome Database, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI
Christopher Welty, IBM Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Dr., Hawthorne, NY
Jennifer Williams, Ontology Works Inc., Odenton, MD
Peter Winkelstein, Clinical & Scientific Informatics, Roswell Park Cancer Institute
W. Jim Zheng, Biomedical Ontology Research Group, Charleston, SC
Ontology Evaluation Committee
The Evaluation Committee is charged with the responsibility to design and conduct objective, empirical tests that measure the quality of ontologies. This will involve the establishment of an application experiment platform that supports rigorous intrinsic quality tests and experiments performed using ontologies provided by participants from academia, government, and industry that demonstrate the potential value of ontology-based technologies. It is intended for the results of these evaluations to inform the development of NCOR best practices for ontological engineering. For its tasks, the committee will leverage the collective experience of its members with prior evaluations of semantic technology through open competitions such as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), Message Understanding Conference (MUC), and Information Interpretation and Integration Conference (I3CON).
The Ontology Evaluation Committee has an Ontology Evaluation Working Area where resources, plans and activities are shared.
Convenors:
Steven Ray, NIST
Todd Hughes, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (contact: thughes@atl.lmco.com)
Members:
Susan Golden, Nervana
Inderjeet Mani, Mitre
Robin A. McEntire, GlaxoSmithKline
Conor Shankey, Visual Knowledge Software Inc.
Outreach Committee
The tasks of the Outreach Committee include: - providing information to the ontology user and developer community of the importance of NCOR's goals of advancing the scientific method in ontology through media and events (writing and speaking for general audiences as well as technical and domain experts;
- advancing NCOR's research methodology by gathering information from organizations about their needs, activities, and investment decision-making processes;
- recruitment of partners with the goal of achieving a critical mass of major public sector agencies and academic institutions, private sector companies, system integrators, and consultancies as members of the NCOR consortium;
- establish relations with partners who will provide resources for funding of (joint) research, communications, events, public information, and receive in their turn predefined benefits such as:
-- certain publications or other research information from NCOR,
-- access to NCOR team expertise -- phone advice, workshops, training, on-site consultation or professional services, etc.
-- advisory participation in NCOR activities or events
Convenors:
Werner Ceusters (European Center for Ontological Research
Mills Davis, TopQuadrant (contact:mdavis@project10x.com)
Technical Committee
The goal of the Technical Committee is to create ontological science and engineering. A tentative list of subsidiary goals includes:
1) Give a good definition of what ontology is, ontology spectrum of semantic models
2) Find ways to advance good content development, such that the results can be used by others, even commercially
3) Develop standards for ontology content which will support both queries and reasoning
4) Contribute to establishing NCOR as Underwriters’ Laboratories of the ontology world (Good Ontology Seal of Approval)
5) Create an Ontology Maturity Model along the lines of the Software Engineering Institute’s 5 level model, related to certification/ accredidation
6) Promote technical best principles and best practices; ontology design patterns
Convenor:
Leo Obrst (contact:lobrst@mitre.org)
Members:
William Andersen
Michael Gruninger
Chris Menzel
Conor Shankey
Government Relations Committee
Details to be supplied.
Convenors:
Brand Niemann (EPA)
Marc Wine (GSA) (contact:marc.wine@gsa.gov)
Committee on Ontology for Health Informatics
The NCOR Committee on Ontology for Health Informatics has the task of advancing ways in which scientific methods in ontology can bring benefits to healthcare. We will work with public and private sector institutions to help advance high-quality work on the ontologies used in conjunction with computer-based applications in areas such as the electronic health record, hospital management, biomedicine, genomics and public health.
One purpose of ontologies is to support the integration of data from different sources, and we believe that such integration will become of increasing importance as ever larger amounts of data become ever more critical to the care of individual patients. The application of ontologies in healthcare can bring practical advantages also in controlling healthcare costs, for example by reducing costs of record keeping by allowing the same data to be used simultaneously for a variety of purposes, ranging from billing and cost-control to clinical trials and diagnostic decision support.
NCOR's Committee on Ontology for Health Informatics will examine how ontology can contribute to the accomplishment of these goals by contributing to the improvement of existing resources in ways designed to advance their harmonization and interoperability. Specifically, this committee will seek to provide guidance to all concerned in promoting the adoption of high quality ontology methods and tools.
The Committee has a collaborative relationship with the National Center for Biomedical Ontology [4], which makes clinical ontologies available to the health-care community and develops new methods to aid the management of ontologies for the development of clinical systems.
Convenors:
Rex Brooks (contact:rexb@starbourne.com)
Barry Smith
Members
Thomas Beale
Werner Ceusters
Christopher Chute
Mark Musen
Bob Smith
Ontology Registry
Work towards an ontology registry has been initiated by Dagobert Soergel dsoergel@umd.edu within the framework of the Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group [4].
Partners
The current list of NCOR Partners is as follows:
Apelon, Inc.
CIM Engineering, Inc.
Gene Ontology Consortium
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories
Medical Ontology Research National Library of Medicine
The Mitre Corporation
Mouse Genome Informatics
MUSC Biomedical Ontology Research Grou
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Ontology Works, Inc.
Open Biomedical Ontologies Consortium
Sierra Nevada Corporation
Stanford Medical Informatics
Structural Informatics Group, University of Washington, Seattle
Topquadrant
Partners in Buffalo
Department of Philosophy
New York State Center of Excellence in the Life Sciences and Bioinformatics
CEDAR
Center for Cognitive Science
Center for Multisource Information Fusion
Computer Science and Engineering
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
Roswell Park Cancer Institute
School of Dental Medicine
School of Informatics
School of Management
School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
Future Events
A list of ontology-related events is maintained here: [5]
The next meeting of the NCOR Scientific Commitee will take place in association with the FOIS meeting (International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems), which is to be held in Baltimore, November 8-11, 2006.
Acknowledgements
NCOR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the following institutions:
New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and the Life Sciences [6],
College of Arts and Sciences of the University at Buffalo [7],
Ontology Works, Inc. [8]
