There will be a discussion period involving the Shared Names Project and the NCBO BioPortal.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

Our next NIF Webinar is scheduled for March 30th, 2010. Please join Dr. Amarnath Gupta  from the University of California, San Diego as he covers: NIF as a Multi-Model Semantic Information System–Part 1: Relational, XML, RDF and OWL models.  Below is information on how to join the online meeting and accompanying teleconference.

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NIF as a Multi-Model Semantic Information System–Part 1: Relational, XML, RDF and OWL models
Presenters: Amarnath Gupta
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

An important goal of the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) is to develop a data infrastructure that can ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured information and perform semantic search over them. This is the first presentation of a series that will cover the NIF data infrastructure. In this presentation. we lay out the foundation of the different forms of data models that NIF is equipped to handle at this point. We specifically describe the relational, object relational, XML, RDF and OWL models of data and knowledge, and touch upon some of their variants. For these models, we present a simplified overview of their semantics, capabilities, and limitations. We conclude the presentation with an outlook of the specialized data models that NIF expects to handle in the future.

We hope you can make it!

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

Our next NIF Webinar is scheduled for February 9th, 2010. Please join Dr. Maryann Martone, Principal Investigator of the NIF Project, and Fahim Imam, Ontology Engineer from UC San Diego,  for an informative session on the NIF Standard Ontology. Details follow.

Date and Time: Tuesday, February 9, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: Defined versus Asserted Classes:  Working with the NIF OWL Ontologies
Presenters: Dr. Maryann Martone and Fahim Imam
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

The NIF project has established a set of modular ontologies covering many of the major domains of relevance to neuroscience, the NIF Standard Ontology (NIFSTD).  This Webinar will focus on NIF’s approach to the asserted vs inferred hierarchy in the NIFSTD ontology and how NIF builds up more complicated relationships among NIF modules while keeping modularity intact.  When it comes to asserted hierarchy of classes, NIFSTD ontologies took the single inheritance principle which is also an important OBO foundry recommendation.  This principle allows us to have the classes that are univocal and unambiguous within the core NIFSTD modules. We believe that this principle is often misunderstood to mean that you can only have a single hierarchy in your ontology.  However, through the use of logical definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, multiple parents can be inferred using automated reasoning.  This saves a great deal of manual labor and provides a logical reason as to how that class may exist in different hierarchies.  In this Webinar, we will provide examples including the NIF’s inferred hierarchy of neurons by neurotransmitter and by soma location.

We look forward to seeing you there.

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

Our next NIF Webinar is scheduled for January 19th, 2010. Please join Dr. Trish Whetzel from the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) for an informative session about the Annotator Tool done by the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO). Details follow.

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: NCBO Annotator
Presenters: Dr. Trish Whetzel
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

This Webinar will provide a demonstration of the NCBO Annotator, an ontology-based Web service used for annotation of textual metadata from public datasets with biomedical ontology concepts, thus facilitating data integration and translational discoveries. Through annotation or tagging of datasets with ontology concepts, unstructured free-text data becomes structured and standardized. Despite these benefits, wide-scale semantic annotation is not common due to the need for trained curators and lack of an ontology repository. We will go through the NCBO Annotator web service workflow and show how it provides an alternative to manual annotation through use of a fast and accurate concept recognition tool and access to almost two hundred ontologies from BioPortal and UMLS.

We really hope you can make it.

Thanks!

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts a biweekly Webinar series on
topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building
the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other
appropriate NIF topics.

Our next Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, December 15, 2009 and will
focus on the MIREOT Tool (Minimum Information to Reference External Ontology Terms).

Date and Time: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: MIREOT Tool
Presenters: Alan Ruttenberg and Melanie Courtot
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

This Webinar will provide a demonstration of the MIREOT Tool and the
rationale for using tools such as MIREOT to synchronize ontology
development.  MIREOT is a mechanism and a minimal information standard
used for importing required terms into an ontology.  The focus of the
demonstration will be on the simple workflow of allowing selective use
of classes from external ontologies.  We will provide suggestions on
implementation for this mechanism and how it can be extended over time.

We hope you can make it.

Thanks!

Hello everybody! The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for November 17, 2009. Please join Sridevi Polavaram from George Mason University for an informative and interactive session about Cell Ontology. Details follow.

Date: November 17, 2009 / 11:00 – 12:00 noon PDT
Topic: Cell Ontology
Presenter: Sridevi Polavaram
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Description: This Webinar provides an explanation of how NIF is building on its cell ontology. We will discuss standard naming conventions and set properties that have been made to ensure proper granularity. We will highlight tools such as the Neurolex Wiki to show how the population of the ontology has been realized. Most of this demonstration will involve the user’s perspective.

As this Webinar will mainly be from the user’s perspective, we strongly encourage you to join us! We look forward to seeing you there.

Greetings! The next NIF Webinar is scheduled for October 27, 2009. Please join Dr. Finn Aarup Nielsen for an informative session about the Brede tools. Details below.

Date: October 27, 2009 / 11:00 – 12:00 noon PDT
Topic: Brede Tools
Presenter: Dr. Finn Aarup Nielsen
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

Description: This Webinar provides an introduction to the Brede tools. The tools consist of the Brede Toolbox, Brede Database, and Brede Wiki. The database and the wiki are collections of neuroimaging studies and their brain activations as well as taxonomies/ontologies. The toolbox is able to process and perform a range of meta-analyses with the data and present the results on the Web. This Webinar will demonstrate the database and the search facility as it appears on the Web.

Check out Nielsen’s journal article on Visualizing data mining results with the Brede tools!

We look forward to seeing you there.