[Derived from Bill Bug]

Hi All,

I'm writing to encourage you all to subscribe to the BIRNLex mailing list:

http://portal.nbirn.net/mailman/listinfo...

I know what you're thinking - "Oh yeah - I've got more cycles I can harvest to invest in my 1394th mailing list subscription." Well, I promise to do all I can to make this worth your while. We'll try to keep the posts short and the threads brisk & utilitarian. Those who know my typical emails may doubt that is possible, but believe me, I've burned enough time on various mailing lists to know, we - the BIRN Ontology Task Force - can't afford not to have a list and can't afford to let it drift off task.

There is considerable content added to BIRNLex in the last 6 months. There is also considerable additional content soon to be added - ontology content related to nerve cell types and molecules that will soon be incorporated into BIRNLex from the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project - in addition to many quite significant application driven additions coming throughout BIRN. We are also beginning to incorporate more expressive relations which will assist in providing mereological reasoning capabilities for neuroanatomy and providing species-specific constraints for a variety of entities all within OWL/SWRL/RDF and represented using OBO-Relations, PATO, OBI, BFO and as much as is practical according to OBO Foundry principles. Finally, in the coming year there will be a variety of nervous system disease related phenotype representation projects that will either be using BIRNLex or will be directly adding to BIRNLex.

In other words, now's the time to make certain there is a consistent and clear audit trail for what is being done or is pending in relation to BIRNLex, so we'd like to start leaning more heavily on this mailing list. As needed, content will be culled from here and added to the BIRNLex Wiki. There is already a great deal of BIRNLex-related Wiki content, and this will also be undergoing an update and re-organization, so the list will make it possible for us to disseminate to all interested parties, when useful additions are made to the Wiki.

Finally, I'd like to encourage all users - or potential users - to post requests, critiques, or comments, so that I can make certain your feedback gets channeled into concrete progress on the ontology. I would suggest we set up a term tracker like activity, but I believe for now, it will suffice to start conversing more regularly. We can add such a capability later, should that be necessary. I would stress, however, that BIRNLex, as an application ontology, is focussed as much as possible on re-using more foundational, generic, or domain ontologies - or casting domains in OWL, when they are not otherwise covered elsewhere in a form that promotes re-use within OWL according to the OBO Foundry practices that undergird our biomedical ontology development. Even in the latter case, when BIRNLex constructs significant domain ontologies, it's typically doing this by converting existing terminologies into the required OWL form and extending or enhancing the expressivity, as applications require. None of this activity would be easily followed right now in a term tracker, though, again, that may change later.

So - thank you for listening, and please start - and keep - those requests and comments coming.

Cheers,
Bill


William Bug, M.S., M.Phil. email: wbug@ncmir.ucsd.edu
Ontological Engineer work: (610) 457-0443
Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)
and
National Center for Microscopy &
Imaging Research (NCMIR)
Dept. of Neuroscience, School of Medicine
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093