Bio-Ontology Research Group Leipzig

The research group was founded in September 2006 as a joint venture of the Bioinformatics group of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Onto-Med group of the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics, and Epidemiology at the University of Leipzig.

The biomedical ontology group pursues an interdisciplinary approach that draws on biology, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, and philosophy in order to extend and enhance the potential applications of biomedical ontologies through the provision of new formal principles and representation methods.

The group’s research aims focus on the following topics:

• Application of methods from formal ontology
  • Ontologies of functions, roles, and relations
  • Core ontologies and new integration methods
  • Ontology of concepts, universals, and symbols
  • Levels of reality
  • Applications of facet analysis
• Non-monotonic reasoning and new inference methods
• Knowledge extensions of bio-medical terminologies
• New conceptual and computer-based tools for ontology building