ontologies

Ontologies in Biomedical Domain

  • Gene Ontology (GO)
    • Controlled vocabulary for gene annotation
    • available in XML
    • contains ontologies for Molecular Function, Biological Process and Cellular Component
  • UMLS Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus
    • a very large metathesaurus built from thesauri, classifications, coding systemts, and lists of controlled terms that are developed by different organizations
    • a concept is defined as a cluster of terms representing the same meaning
    • 1.75 million English terms drawn from more than syxty families of medical vocabulary, organized in some 875000 concepts.
    • includes the SPECIALIST lexicon, containing syntactic, morphological, and orthographic information on medical terms, and various software tools
  • MeSH
    • controlled Thesaurus by the National Library of Medicine
    • very broad scope
    • integrated into Pubmed/MedLine search facility
    • not everyone happy with the contents (e.g. see Barry Smith, COLING04)
  • ICD is the International Classification of Diseases
    • outdated, but comprehensive

Acknowledgments : some of the material in this page originates from here