| Resource |
Description |
| Extensible Markup Language (XML) |
"Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879), (a data formating standard) originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing." The XML standards committee now consists of multiple working groups developing rich, flexible XML-derived formalisms for encoding information presentation (XSL, XSLT & XSL/FO), hyperlinks (XLink & XPointer), data schemas (XML Schema) and information queries (XQuery and XPath). |
| Resource Description Framework (RDF) |
"The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a (formal, structured) framework for representing information in the Web." |
| OWL Web Ontology Language |
"The Web Ontology Language OWL is a semantic markup language for publishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web. OWL is developed as a vocabulary extension of RDF (the Resource Description Framework) and is derived from the DAML+OIL Web Ontology Language...OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full." |
| LBase: Semantics for Languages of the Semantic Web |
"...a framework for specifying the semantics for the languages of the Semantic Web. Some of these languages (notably RDF [RDF-PRIMER] [RDF-VOCABULARY] [RDF-SYNTAX] [RDF-CONCEPTS] [RDF-SEMANTICS], and OWL [OWL]) are currently in various stages of development and we expect others to be developed in the future. This framework is intended to provide a framework for specifying the semantics of all of these languages in a uniform and coherent way. The strategy is to translate the various languages into a common 'base' language thereby providing them with a single coherent model theory." |
| The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) |
"...XML has a limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) with respect to objects. The use of ontologies provides a very powerful way to describe objects and their relationships to other objects. The DAML language is being developed as an extension to XML and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The latest release of the language (DAML+OIL) provides a rich set of constructs with which to create ontologies and to markup information so that it is machine readable and understandable." |
| Metadata.net |
Definitive references on the current state of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and other related metadata standards. |
| Life Science Identifier (LSID) |
"(A) resolution protocol, to locate biologically significant data over a network." |
| Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) |
"(OBO) is an umbrella web address for well-structured controlled vocabularies for shared use across different biological and medical domains." OBO specifies a set of clear requirements a given ontology must meet to be included under their "umbrella", including being provided in one of several formats - e.g., OBO.xml, GO-OWL.xml or text |
| The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) from the National Library of Medicine |
"The purpose of NLM's Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) is to facilitate the development of computer systems that behave as if they "understand" the meaning of the language of biomedicine and health...There are three UMLS Knowledge Sources: the Metathesaurus®, the Semantic Network, and the SPECIALIST lexicon...The Metathesaurus® is a very large, multi-purpose, and multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. It is built from the electronic versions of many different thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, indexing and cataloging biomedical literature, and /or basic, clinical, and health services research...(the) purpose (of the Metathesaurus®) is to link alternative names and views of the same concept together (i.e., create a Semantic Concordance across all source vocabularies) and to identify useful relationships between different concepts. All concepts in the Metathesaurus® are assigned to at least one semantic type from the Semantic Network. This provides consistent categorization of all concepts in the Metathesaurus at the relatively general level represented in the Semantic Network. Many of the words and multi-word terms that appear in concept names or strings in the Metathesaurus® also appear in the SPECIALIST lexicon. The lexical tools are used to generate the word, normalized word, and normalized string indexes to the Metathesaurus®...the Semantic Network provides a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS Metathesaurus® and provides a set of useful relationships between these concepts. All information about specific concepts is found in the Metathesaurus®; the Semantic Network provides information about the set of basic semantic types, or categories, which may be assigned to these concepts, and it defines the set of relationships that may hold between the semantic types...There are major groupings of semantic types for organisms, anatomical structures, biologic function, chemicals, events, physical objects, and concepts or ideas. The SPECIALIST lexicon provides the lexical information needed for the SPECIALIST Natural Language Processing System (NLP). It is intended to be a general English lexicon including many biomedical terms. Coverage includes both commonly occurring English words and biomedical vocabulary. The lexicon entry for each word or term records the syntactic, morphological, and orthographic information needed by the SPECIALIST NLP System. The lexical programs or tools address the high degree of variability in natural language words and terms. ...(They) allow the user to abstract away from this sort of variation." |
