COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE - SCALE BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGIES - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 199

properties in the ontology. Third, curators need to be able to set the status of
a proposal once a decision has been take, and the status needs to be refl ected
back into BioPortal. We think that this type of proposal workfl ow is quite
common, and we are working on designing and implementing it. Other bio-
medical projects may require different workfl ows, however. Our long-term
goal is to provide support for generic collaboration workfl ows in our tools.
Both WebProtégé and BioPortal are in current production use for several
biomedical projects, one of the most prominent ones being the collaborative
development of ICD-11 [7, 8]. So far, the collaborative authoring has been
performed mainly by WHO internal experts in WebProt é g é . BioPortal has
been used for importing and referencing terms from other biomedical ontolo-
gies and terminologies. In the next ICD-11 revision phase, WHO plans to open
the process to a broader user community in which anyone can submit propos-
als that are reviewed and, if appropriate, integrated in ICD-11. In this new
workfl ow, we envision that BioPortal will be the main platform on which users
will add change proposals, and WebProtégé will be the tool in which the
changes are applied. In order to have this workfl ow work, the two systems
need to work seamlessly together.
Our experience with the ICD-11 development and with other projects
convinces us that users will benefi t from a closer integration of the editing and
publishing processes as part of a streamlined workfl ow for collaborative ontol-
ogy development.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has been supported in part by research grant GM086587 from the National
Institute of General Medical Sciences, by the Protégé Resource supported by grant
P41LM007885 from the National Library of Medicine, and by the National Center for
Biomedical Ontology, supported by grant U54HG004028 from the National Institutes
of Health.
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