Ontologies provide a conceptualization of a domain that can be shared among diverse groups of researchers and health care professionals and used computationally for multiple purposes. Biologic knowledge is evolving so rapidly that it is difficult for most scientists to assimilate and integrate the new information with their existing knowledge. Promoting the creation and use of ontologies for the field and linking to other ontologies in related domains holds the promise of assisting those working in biomedical disciplines and thus making more rapid scientific progress.
Biological knowledge is evolving from structural genomics towards functional genomics and will revolutionize the way healthcare is provided. The tremendous amount of DNA and protein sequence information now available provides the foundation for studying the proteome, the transcriptome, and next the metabolome (interacting networks of proteins and substrates). In contrast to biomedical terminologies which promote a standard way of naming concepts involved in biological processes, ontologies provide an organizational framework of the concepts in a system of hierarchical and associative relations that allows reasoning about biomedical knowledge.
This session would welcome papers that discuss: