Creating Neuroscience Ontologies

The insufficiency of terminological standards in neuroscience is increasingly recognized as a serious obstacle to interoperability. Adoption of a controlled vocabulary is a successful solution for small numbers of groups that work closely together but is impractical for large numbers of groups who represent diverse areas of research, index information by various legitimate nomenclatures, or publish in different languages. Interoperability among such disparate databases requires a translation mechanism, or “mediator,” to enable communication and data sharing among databases. Shared ontologies are essential components of a mediator. An ontology codifies the relations between terms of multiple nomenclatures and the concepts they represent. Neuroanatomy is central to neuroscience, and neuroanatomical terminology represents a core portion of the vocabulary of neuroscience. We have created in NeuroNames an ontology of 2500 neuroanatomical concepts referenced by 15,000 terms in seven languages. NeuroNames is the mediator for BrainInfo, a portal to neuroanatomy on the Web. We hope that a description of our experience in establishing interoperability between BrainInfo and other neuroscience Web sites may be useful to others engaged in the development of ontologies for neuroscience.