Biositemaps

Biositemaps

The [| NCBC Resourcome Working Group] of the NIH Roadmap National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBC) (www.ncbcs.org) is prototyping technologies to address (i) locating, (ii) querying, (iii) composing or combining, and (iv) mining software tools and information resources on the Internet. Each site which intends to contribute to the inventory instantiates a file on its Internet site ‘'biositemap.rdf' which conforms to a defined RDF schema and uses concepts from the Biomedical Resource Ontology to describe the resources.

What is a Biositemap?

Biositemaps represent a mechanism for computational biologists and bio-informaticians to openly broadcast and retrieve meta-data about biomedical data, tools and services (i.e., biomedical resources) over the Internet. The overarching principle is quite simple: we recommend that all Institutions with an interest in biomedical research publish a biositemap.rdf file on their Internet site. Each biositemap.rdf file is simply a list of controlled metadata about resources (software tools, databases, material resources) that your organization uses or believes are important to biomedical research.

• The key enabling technologies are the Information Model (IM) which is the list of metadata fields about each resource (Resource_name, description, contact_person, resource_type,...) and
• The Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) which is a controlled terminology for the 'resource_type' and which is used to improve the sensitivity and specificity of web searches.

What is the Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO)?

A key enabling technology for Biositemaps is the Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO) which is a controlled terminology for the 'resource_type' and which is used to improve the sensitivity and specificity of web searches. This is under development by a number of NIH-funded researchers who have a combined interest in classification of biomedical resources. The publication site for BRO is the BioPortal.