The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations is an open-access, integrated ontology for the description of biological and clinical investigations. OBI provides a model for the design of an investigation, the protocols and instrumentation used, the materials used, the data generated and the type of analysis performed on it. The project is being developed as part of the OBO Foundry and as such adheres to all the principles therein such as orthogonal coverage and the use of a common formal language. In OBI the common formal language used is the Web Ontology Language. As of March 2008, a pre-release version of the ontology was made available at the project's SVN repository.
Scope
The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations addresses the need for controlled vocabularies to support integration and joint analysis of experimental data, a need originally identified in the transcriptomicsdomain by the FGED Society, which developed the MGED Ontology as an annotation resource for microarray data. OBI uses the basic formal ontologyupper-level ontology as a means of describing general entities that do not belong to a specific problem domain. As such, all OBI classes are a subclass of some BFO class. The ontology has the scope of modeling all biomedical investigations and as such contains ontology terms for aspects such as:
Less 'concrete' aspects such as the role a given entity may play in a particular scenario and the function of an entity are also covered in the ontology.
OBI Consortium
The MGED Ontology was originally identified in the transcriptomics domain by the FGED Society and was developed to address the needs of data integration. Following a mutual decision to collaborate, this effort later became a wider collaboration between groups such as FGED, PSI and MSI in response to the needs of areas such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics and the FuGO was created. This later became the OBI covering the wider scope of all biomedical investigations. As an international, cross-domain initiative, the OBI consortium draws upon a pool of experts from a variety of fields, not limited to biology. The current list of OBI consortium members is available at the OBI consortium website. The consortium is made up of a coordinating committee which is a combination of two subgroups, the Community Representative and the Core Developers. Separate to the coordinating committee is the Developers Working Group which consists of developers within the communities collaborating in the development of OBI at the discretion of current OBI Consortium members.
