What is Ontology?

Additional information about ontology can be found through the OBO Foundry, the Gene Ontology, and through Professor Smith's webpage.

"The advent of the Web and modern high-throughput techniques is having a major impact on the manner in which biomedical research is conducted. The explosive growth in biomedical data being generated by high-throughput experimental techniques has created tremendous opportunities for discovery by mining these data. Scientists increasingly rely on large online databases as a source of knowledge and data for exploration of new hypotheses. While this new e-science paradigm brings with it tremendous opportunities, it also poses significant challenges, because researchers are now confronted with huge data sets, bringing the urgent need for both people and computers to be able to make sense of massive quantities of heterogeneous data.

Ontologies—collections of formal, machine-processable and human-interpretable representations of the entities, and the relations among those entities, within a defined application domain—are helping researchers manage the information explosion by providing explicit descriptions of biomedical entities and an approach to annotating, analyzing the results of clinical and scientific research. Ontologies are useful because they provide regimentations of terminology that can support the reusability and integration of data and thereby support the development of useful systems for purposes such as decision support, data annotation, information retrieval, and natural-language processing." (From http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/omi.2006.10.185.)