Ontolog invited Speaker Presentation - Professor Mark Musen - Thu 2007.12.06    (15RM)

Conference Call Details:    (15ZC)

Attendees    (1603)

Agenda & Proceedings    (160B)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/resource/presentation/MarkMusen_20071206/mark_musen2.gif [Professor Mark Musen]    (160E)

. . Title: If we build it, will they come? Social-engineering of new technology to disseminate biomedical ontologies    (160F)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) is developing a wide range of Web-based services to assist end users in browsing, evaluation, and use of ontologies. These features include capabilities for which there is no specific correlate in current technology for ontology management. These features include online community-based review and annotation of ontologies, support for declaring mappings between ontologies, and the push of information about ontology changes directly to a user's desktop. These novel capabilities for ontology access and use have the potential to address pressing end-user needs and to engage entire research communities in the development, evolution, and evaluation of controlled terminologies and ontologies. Our work offers possibilities for the creation of a new kind of collaborative, community-based approach to the dissemination and use of ontologies. The key question is whether our user community is ready for such capabilities. The issue is one of sociology and culture as much as it is one of technology. This talk will describe the BioPortal for access to biomedical ontologies online, and will outline our future plans for this novel, Web-based resource.    (15WT)

Dr. Mark Musen is Professor of Medicine (Medical Informatics) and Computer Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where he is head of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (formerly Stanford Medical Informatics). Among numerous other research positions, he is the Principal Investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology research consortium. He holds an MD from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Stanford.    (160O)

Dr. Musen conducts research related to intelligent systems, the Semantic Web, reusable ontologies and knowledge representations, and biomedical decision support. His long-standing work on a system known as Protégé has led to an open-source technology now used by thousands of developers around the world to build intelligent computer systems and new computer applications for e-commerce and the Semantic Web. He is known for his research of the application of intelligent computer systems to assist health-care workers in guideline-directed therapy and in management of clinical trials. Dr. Musen’s group has begun to explore the use of knowledge-based technologies to monitor a variety of data sources in an effort to detect incipient epidemics, including those caused by possible acts of bioterrorism.    (160P)

In 1989 Dr. Musen received the Young Investigator Award for Research in Medical Knowledge Systems from the American Association of Medical Systems and Informatics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1992. He has served on the Biomedical Library Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine and as an advisor to many academic and industrial groups concerned with the development of advanced information technology. Dr. Musen sits on the editorial boards of several journals related to medical informatics and computer science. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Ontology.    (160Q)

Questions, Answers & Discourse:    (160W)

Audio Recording of this Session    (1616)