Ontology Conference Aims to Develop Common Biomedical Language
Barry Smith, PhD, Julian Park Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Published July 8, 2011 This content is archived.
Hundreds of international scientists will gather at UB this month to help develop a common language of biomedical terms that can be uniformly interpreted by people and computers.
The goal of those attending the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology is to create a way for researchers to easily retrieve and understand all data produced within the life sciences.
“It is a huge order—little understood by the general public and difficult to achieve—but absolutely necessary for the continued development of biomedical science,” says conference convener Barry Smith, PhD, Julian Park Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UB.
Uniform Terms Spur Cross-Disciplinary Research
The public assumes that biomedical scientists use the same words to mean the same things. But in different research fields, and in different contexts, even such common terms as “pain,” “gene,” “blood” and “cancer” may have different meanings.
With the exponential growth of biomedical data, this fact has enormous implications, Smith says. It leads to incompatibilities that frequently confuse or halt cross-disciplinary research and limit communication among researchers.
Ontologies—uniform, agreed-upon systems of meaning—are designed to prevent such confusion.
“We not only need to develop and populate ontologies,” Smith says. “We need to encode shared definitions in a way that enables computer programs to use them, and then promulgate our results to researchers throughout the world so that they understand this new knowledge and have functional access to it.”
Conference Registration Still Open
In addition to scientific presentations, conference attendees will give poster sessions, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations of new software critical for translational research.
Topics include:
- techniques and technologies for collaborative ontology development
- reasoning with biomedical ontologies
- the evaluation of biomedical ontologies
Presenters will consider these issues in connection with gene and cell research, biomedical imaging, biochemistry and drug discovery, biomedical investigations, experimentation, clinical trials, clinical and translational research, and development and anatomy.
The conference registration form and schedule are available online.
Informatics Experts Scheduled to Speak
Keynote speakers are Bernard de Bono, MD, PhD, of the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Roberto Rocha, MD, PhD, senior corporate manager for knowledge management and clinical decision support in the Clinical Informatics Research and Development group of Partners Healthcare and Harvard School of Medicine.
In addition to Smith, UB presenters include Werner Ceusters, MD, professor of psychiatry.
Ceusters is principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health grant focused on an ontology for pain and related disability, mental health and quality of life.
He will illustrate how this developing ontology can help patients with chronic pain accurately describe how they feel to health care providers.
Other UB presenters are:
- Alexander Diehl, Department of Neurology
- Randall Dipert, Department of Philosophy
- Patrice Seyed, Computer Science
- Alan Ruttenberg, School of Dental Medicine