About the Ontogenesis Network
The network funded by EPSRC started in October 2006. The purpose of it is to foster the creation, ontogeny and evolution of life science and medical ontologies ('biomedical ontologies') in order to enhance the sciences that use such ontologies, by allowing biomedical information and knowledge to be more easily managed in machine-processable form. Its members form an interdisciplinary group of UK computer scientists, biologists and informaticians who work on various aspects of the semantic web.
Network objectives
The aims of the network are:
- To unite computer scientists with experience in Semantic Web tool building, and logicians skilled in the arts of description logics and in the use of protégé-OWL ontology creation, with biologists and informaticians who have real-world use cases requiring such ontologies, to form an ongoing multidisciplinary collaboration that will foster the creation, ontogeny and evolution of biological, bioinformatics and medical ontologies using Semantic Web technologies.
- To provide a structure within which Ontogenesis Network participants (and colleagues) can share with one another their various expertises, thereby enabling them to investigate and develop best practices for the creation and implementation of well-structured ontologies that will meet real scientific needs.
- To study impact of change and evolution within scientific fields on the bio-ontologies that describe these fields, to make preliminary models of how bio-ontologies change, and to consider how such change should best be managed.