Archive for NCBC working group Wiki Pages
NCBC Working Groups Charter:
The RFA states the goal of creating “the networked national effort to build the computational infrastructure for biomedical computing for the nation”. In furthering this, the goals of the Software and Data Integration Working Group (SDIWG) in concert with the Project Team and Centers staff are: 1. To advance the domain sciences, and promote software interoperability and data exchange. 2. To capture the collective knowledge of software engineering and practices among the Centers and publish this knowledge widely.
There are 4 NCBC Working Groups:
Biositemaps:
The Biositemaps Working Group of the NIH Roadmap National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBC) (www.ncbcs.org) has developed technologies to address (i) locating, (ii) querying, (iii) composing or combining, and (iv) mining biomedical resources. Each site which intends to contribute to the inventory instantiates a file on its Internet site ‘'biositemap.rdf' which conforms to a defined RDF schema and uses concepts from the Biomedical Resource Ontology to describe the resources.
More information is available at: http://biositemaps.org
NCBC Scientific Ontologies:
The goal of the NCBC Scientific Ontologies working group has been a purposefully narrow and pragmatic one: to create a succinct categorization of ontologies and terminologies that are useful for the biomedical research community. We are cognizant that there are a multiplicity of user communities for ontologies and indeed these a growing rapidly. Many of these communities are not primarily interested in further development or refinement of ontologies but recognize the utility of such computable corpora of biomedical knowledge and wish to use them right now. This is our target audience. We are not representing this work as that of a standards organization nor of a prescriptive or authoritative body. Rather we have reviewed the ontologies that we, the members of the NCBC community, are using or intend to use shortly and have provide a rough-cut categorization. Simple as this task may seem, it has taken many telephone conference calls, a multi-hour meeting in Washington, DC and multiple emails and collective edits to arrive at this consensus. Frankly, we are pleased and even a little surprised at how successful we were in reaching a consensus view.
The current categorization of these ontologies (and note that we use this term intentionally loosely and it encompassed rather flat and unstructured terminologies as well) can be found at: courtesy of Suzi Lewis. There are three main categories:
- Category 1: Fully endorsed
- Category 2: Widely used and endorsed but there are some reservations among at least a subset of the users about the structure and/or function and/or usability of these ontologies.
- Category 3: Not quite ready for use but highly promising and efforts to develop these are strongly endorsed by the NCBC's.
The NCBC Scientific Ontologies Wiki can be found at: http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/SDIWG:_NCBC_Scientific_Ontologies
Driving Biological Projects (DBP) Interactions and Impact:
A dynamic NCBC DBP Interactions map can be found at: http://www.ncbcs.org/dbp_interactions.html
Dissemination:
The NIH National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) were established to "create a networked national effort to build the computational infrastructure for biomedical computing in the nation." As part of that effort, the NCBCs are charged with "providing the tools and resources that biomedical and behavioral researchers need to do their work." The focus of the NCBC Dissemination Working Group is make researchers aware of these NCBC-developed tools and resources and how they can impact biology and clinical medicine.
More information is available at: https://simtk.org/home/ncbcdisseminate
