Biositemaps
The NCBC Resourcome Working Group of the NIH Roadmap National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBC) (www.ncbcs.org) is prototyping technologies to address (i) locating, (ii) querying, (iii) composing or combining, and (iv) mining software tools and information resources on the Internet. Each site which intends to contribute to the inventory instantiates a file on its Internet site ‘biositemap.xml’ which conforms to a defined schema and is tagged by a resource ontology.
The biositemap is described in greater detail in Biositemaps_White_Paper_V3.2.doc. The discussion thread for biositemaps can be found in Tools and Applications (see also tab at the top of this page). The official Working Groups (SDIWG) meeting minutes for the NCBC are available here.
· A prototype schema may be found at www.ncbcs.org/biositemaps/biositemaps-v04.xsd. A good reference for XML editors is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xml_editor, e.g., we are using XMLmind.
· A prototype resource ontology may be found at http://bioontology.org/projects/ontologies/SoftwareOntology/
The functions of (i) locating and (ii) querying biositemaps are prototyped in the iTools application http://www.loni.ucla.edu/iToolssvc/ncbc_iTools.html.
The list below includes some examples of BioSiteMap.xml files that adhere to the prototype schema above.
CCB BioSiteMap
NCBO BioSiteMap
NCIBI BioSiteMap
* Note that each of these contain the proper links to Center-specific pages.
A complete description of the Biositemap protocol and rational is provided on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biositemap.
For further information on this project, please contact:
Ivo Dinov: 
Beth Kirschner: bkirschn@umich.edu
Peter Lyster: lysterp@mail.nih.gov