Ontology is originally a philosophical concept. With the development of information science and artificial intelligence, ontology has a new meaning in its application. It has also been used to logically represent the entities and their relationships in a specific domain. The ontological representation is understandable by both humans and computers. As a result, ontology provides a shared and unified understanding of the nature of things in this field.

Terminology is a collection of standardized terms in an academic domain or discipline. It is an important product of modern science in human languages. Many biomedical terminologies, such as SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), have greatly supported and promoted the collection, storage, dissemination, analysis and utilization of various types of biomedical information. Terminology and ontology have similar functions. The ontology is a controlled terminology that invokes formal semantic relations between and among terms.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, many high throughput sequencing technologies have been widely used in biomedical research. How to effectively integrate, utilize, analyze and explain the vast volume of data generated by these new technologies is still a great challenge. Gene Ontology, which was born twenty years ago, has greatly promoted data analysis and database building in bioinformatics. The Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry (http://obofoundry.org/) has developed more than 150 interoperable ontologies under the principles of openness and cooperation. Meanwhile, the precision medicine demands to integrate those data with more and more phenotypic data from clinical practice to support medical decision. Biomedical ontology plays an important role in solving the issue of data heterogeneity, leading to advanced data analysis, knowledge organization and reasoning.

In China, the progresses in precision medicine and data integration also bring huge demands for biomedical ontology. It has become an important research field to integrate ontologies with the existing medical information systems in China.

This second annual Chinese Conference on Biomedical Ontology and Terminology (CCBOT-2019) aims to promote collaborative development and application of biomedical ontologies and terminologies in China and across the world. We sincerely invite the stakeholders related to biomedical data to gather together, showcase their research results and products, and discuss possible issues and solutions. We also expect that the conference will become a productive platform to encourage broad community collaborations in the future.

• Ontology and application

2019/10/28

Coming soon...

Submission link: Easychair

Submission deadline: October 10, 2019

29-30/10/2019

Conference activity

• Ontology introduction, OBOFoundey basic principle, mgrep term AI query
• Ontology development example and OWL/SPARQL programming course
• Analysis and research of Ontology data
• Traditional Chinese Medicine Ontology with BFO