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NIF Beta Test Site |
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NIF VocabulariesThe NIF has assembled a controlled vocabulary of over 60,000 concepts relevant to neuroscience. These concepts come from existing terminology resources where possible and have been enhanced with terms contributed by domain experts in the neurosciences during NIF-sponsored terminology workshops. The vocabularies are being organized into formal ontologies encoded in OWL, the web onotolgy language according to the biomedical ontology best practices promoted by the National Center for Biomedical Onology (OBO Foundry Principles). Each concept is identified by a unique ID and also includes synonyms and other lexical variants, references to the original source, and a clear well-founded, human readable definition. The base structure of the NIF ontology derives from the BIRNLex , which itself builds off of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the OBO Relations Ontology (OBO RO). The OBO Foundry process promotes re-use of common existing ontologies such as the Gene Ontology and the Sequence Ontology to ensure maximum re-sue and ease of sharing the resulting data annotations. It also encourages a representational technique that can support the decomposition of complex concepts (e.g., structure-function relations in the nervous system), so as to fully support re-combining or querying data sets based on the underlying fundamental concepts to which they refer. The NIF uses these vocabularies both to annotate resources (see "Registering a Resource to the NIF") and to expand and refine searches of the NIF resources (see " Searching the NIF: Advanced"). The NIFSTD OWL file is available here. To search and browse the content and structure of the NIF vocabularies, please consult the NIF Vocabulary Browser, OntologEZ, available here. |
 Department of Health and Human Services  National Institutes of Health  |
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