BioPortal: A Web Repository for Biomedical Ontologies and Data Resources

Biomedical ontologies provide essential domain knowledge to drive data integration, infor- mation retrieval, data annotation, natural-language processing, and decision support. The Na- tional Center for Biomedical Ontology is developing BioPortal, a Web-based system that serves as a repository for biomedical ontologies. BioPortal denes relationships among those ontolo- gies and between the ontologies and online data resources such as PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). BioPortal supports not only the technical require- ments for access to biomedical ontologies either via Web browsers or via Web services, but also community-based participation in the evaluation and evolution of ontology content. BioPortal enables ontology users to learn what biomedical ontologies exist, what a particular ontology might be good for, and how individual ontologies relate to one another. BioPortal is available online at http://bioportal.bioontology.org.