Ontologies in biology

In recent years ontologies have come to play an increasingly important role in the biomedical domain. Primary applications have been the formalisation of community knowledge in molecular biology, and the provision of a shared vocabulary for the annotation of the growing amount of biological data being generated. Ontologies now play a key role in the analysis and reporting of biological data and act as the basis for new biological services being hosted by various GRID projects. More formal methods from ontology theory are gradually being adopted, and have made the existing ontologies more robust. These approaches will continue to extend the number of potential applications for ontologies in the biomedical domain.