Duke and SUNY at Buffalo get grant to build ontology

The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded Duke University a $1.25 million grant to develop the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO). SUNY at Buffalo receives a $250,000 subcontract under the award.

The goal of the grant is to create an ontology of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, and its related genes, proteins, capsule, pathophysiology, and diseases. If researchers from multiple institutions all encode their data using IDO, then they can combine their data sets more easily to generate new scientific knowledge.

The grant represents something of a novelty for the National Institutes of Health (one of which is NIAID), because it issues few grants or requests for proposals with a focus of ontology development. Congratulations to the researchers involved, and we wish them success, as their success could determine whether the NIH funds similar work.

The Purpose of this Blog

The purpose of this blog is bring the latest developments in the world of ontology into one place for information, discussion, and dissemination.

To get an idea of what this blog is (or will be) about, here are some links, in no particular order:

1. Wikipedia definition of ontology
2. Wikipedia definition of applied ontology (we'll spend most of our time on applied ontology)
3. The homepage of Dr. Barry Smith at the University at Buffalo
4. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry
5. The Gene Ontology
6. The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) Ontology
7. The Protege open-source ontology development tool
8. The W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard
9. The Ontolog Forum
10. The Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) conference series
11. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO)
12. The NCBO Dissemination Wiki