1. What is The Ontogenesis Network?
' A network of excellence to foster the creation, ontogeny and evolution of biological ontologies '
2. Purposes of the Ontogenesis Network
The purpose of the Ontogenesis Network is to unite computer scientists with experience in Semantic Web tool building with those skilled in the arts of Protégé-OWL ontology creation and description logics, and with biologists and informaticians who have real-world use cases, to form an ongoing multidisciplinary collaboration in which methods can be developed, knowledge and training can be shared both within and beyond the Network’s partnership, and seminars, tutorials and papers describing best practice can be delivered and published. Furthermore, the Network will act to undertake requirements analysis and planning for funding applications to support major research projects to develop specific tools, systems and biological ontologies. The Network will also bring together the international community interested in community development and evolution of ontologies in a symposium linked to a forthcoming international Semantic Web Conference.
3. Why do we need it?
Much biological and medical knowledge now resides in on-line resources, but the biomedical community is highly fragmented, with different disciplines acting autonomously, producing data repositories and analytical tools that operate over them in isolation. The intelligent integration of these resources presents serious analytical and practical challenges, due to complexity within the information itself, to the large number and heterogeneity of the data repositories, and to the idiosyncratic nature of the present tools that need to be used and linked in order to answer the questions posed by the e-biologist. Furthermore, these data collections are dynamic both in terms of the data they contain and the ways that these data are defined and their analytical tools evolve. As new scientific discoveries are made, keeping track of commensurate changes is difficult. Semantic Web technologies, and in particular ontologies (formal explicit specifications of agreed conceptualisations of particular domains of knowledge) are increasingly recognised as vital to the creation of next-generation data management systems that can help working biologists surmount these challenges. The role of an ontology is to facilitate the understanding, sharing, re-use and integration of knowledge through the construction of an explicit domain model that permits accurate descriptions of data objects, allowing data to be structured in consistent and interoperable ways, and enabling machine reasoning over those descriptions, opening the possibility for automated ‘intelligent’ searches over the semantically structured information.