Biositemaps

This is the main page for the NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) Working Group titled: Biositemaps and the Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO)

Top page of NCBC Working Groups web site

Contacts for this Working Group are [mailto: Ivo Dinov], [mailto: Trish Whetzel], and Peter Lyster

For more information about the NCBCs visit the Top page of ncbcs.org web site which is maintained by the NCBCs themselves

Biositemaps

The Biositemaps Working Group of the NIH Roadmap National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBC) (www.ncbcs.org) has developed a standard for communicating information on the Internet about biomedical resources (tools, data, material, and services). The official public site for this effort is http://www.biositemaps.org/. In addition, the working group is using the biositemaps standard to address (i) locating, (ii) querying, (iii) composing or combining, and (iv) mining biomedical 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 [http: Biomedical Resource Ontology (BRO)} to describe the resources. Each biositemap.rdf file is simply a list of controlled metadata about 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) v2.7 which is a controlled terminology for the 'resource_type', 'area_of_research', and 'biomedical_activity' 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.