Term Requests: Needs, Activities, Plans

Date: December 8, 2018

Speaker: John Graybeal, BMIR, Stanford University

Abstract

With increasing adoption of semantics in biomedical applications, interoperability of biomedical tools and data requires the best possible technologies and practices for submitting, exchanging, moderating, and acting on requests for changes to semantic content like ontologies and controlled vocabularies. For example, a request for a new term for an ontology should be conveyed to the individual or community curator of that ontology, and any resulting action should be signaled to the tools and users who will benefit from it.

Unfortunately, there are almost no current technologies and practices available to support this need, even at the most basic level of adding a term. So at the critical point when an individual user sees the need for a change to semantic content, there is almost never a way to actually make that request

We’ll present this situation, its impacts, and current activities to describe and improve the situation.