Simon Twigger @ MCW

As part of our grant with the National Center for Biomedical Ontology we are producing a number of educational videos/screencasts to help introduce ontologies to the broader scientific community. The basic idea behind these videos is that ontologies are really powerful but most of our wet lab colleagues are put off by the complexity and the jargon and so dont always get as much value as they should from the ontologies and their associated annotations. Jennifer Smith has created two videos so far as part of this series aimed at the bench scientist or clinician who wants to get a more gentle introduction to ontologies and what they can do for them. So far these videos cover the basics of what an ontology is and then go into a bit more detail on ontology annotations as often seen in the biomedical arena. Currently these are more biology-focused rather than clinical we use the Gene Ontology and similar types of ontologies as examples. As we get going we’d like to do some more clinically oriented videos too.

#1 Introduction to Biomedical Ontologies 1: What is an Ontology?

Available at SciVee, Vimeo or YouTube

#2 Introduction to Ontologies #2: Anatomy of an Ontology Annotation, part 1

Available at SciVee, Vimeo or YouTube

We’d be really interested in your feedback on these videos and their content, along with suggestions for other ontology-related topics that you think would be worth covering.