NCBO

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is a U.S. research center funded by the National Institutes of Health to advance the use of biomedical ontologies for data integration, interoperability, and knowledge discovery. Its mission is to enable researchers to share and reuse biomedical knowledge by providing common standards, tools, and resources that facilitate semantic annotation and integration across diverse datasets and applications.

A central component of the NCBO is BioPortal, a large online repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies. BioPortal offers search and browsing capabilities, term lookups, and programmatic access through web services. It is designed to support ontology reuse and cross-database interoperability, enabling researchers to discover relevant terms and concepts across many ontologies.

In addition to BioPortal, the NCBO develops tools for text annotation, mapping, and ontology recommendation. The NCBO Annotator and related services identify ontology concepts within unstructured text and map them to standardized terms. Other tools assist in recommending appropriate ontologies for a given domain or annotation task and in creating or evaluating mappings between ontologies. All of these resources are provided through RESTful APIs and web interfaces to support programmatic and human use.

The NCBO collaborates with academic and industrial partners worldwide and is supported by NIH funding aimed at advancing standards for biomedical information. It has contributed to the broader ecosystem of biomedical ontologies by promoting interoperability, encouraging ontology reuse, and enabling researchers to annotate, search, and integrate data more effectively.

See also: ontology, biomedical ontology, BioPortal, ontology annotation, ontology mapping.