Introduction to Ontology Development and Tools – Part II

Collaborative Ontology Development and Evolution with WebProtégé and BioPortal


Tutorial at the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2011)

26 July 2011, Buffalo, USA



Instructor:
Natasha Noy

Objective

Many biomedical ontologies are products of collaborative work by a community of users. In this tutorial, we will discuss two tools that support various stages of collaborative ontology development. WebProtégé supports collaborative and distributed ontology authoring and, provides a simple view of the ontology structure, enables different users to edit an ontology simultaneously, to discuss the ontology content and to document these discussions in the context of the ontology.

While WebProtégé enables the editing of ontologies, the NCBO BioPortal provides a community-based repository of ontologies where developers can publish their ontologies, solicit feedback from the community, and get structured requests for new terms and other ontology changes.

The two tools are integrated in several ways. Fro example, when users post comments or term requests in BioPortal, ontology developers can view these requests in WebProtégé, act on them, change their status, and so on. These changes become visible to BioPortal users.

This tutorial will introduce attendees to the basics of editing ontologies collaboratively in WebProtégé. We will then introduce BioPortal, discuss how to publish an ontology in BioPortal and link it to other ontologies, and how to provide and collect feedback on your ontology. We will also give a brief overview of the ontology services that BioPortal provides for all ontologies in its repositories and discuss how these services can be

Intended audience

This half-day tutorial will be of interest for anyone involved in ontology design and development.