An ongoing success story!
The 3rd Ontologies4Chem Workshop, hosted by NFDI4Chem and co-organised by NFDI4Cat, took place from 9 to 11 December 2024. The online event, which has been going since 2022, was a great success again this year, with more than 60 international participants and many renowned speakers from all over the world. The main goal of the Ontologies4Chem Workshop series is to create a space where experts working on different ontology projects, domain and ontology specialists, software developers, and service providers from NFDI4Chem and other NFDI consortia related to chemistry can meet and exchange ideas. This helps identify synergies and create new opportunities for collaboration.
The main topic of the first day was chemical ontologies and their application with a focus on status reports, new developments and industry collaborations. A short introduction with a review of the last two Ontologies4Chem Workshops was followed by a status report from NFDI4Chem on the activities in the field of ontology development/curation. In addition, there were also updates on the latest developments of the NFDI4Chem Terminology Service and Search Service as well as the work in the area of Minimum Information about Chemical Investigations (MIChI’s), e.g. in the field of NMR, in order to be able to capture domain-specific metadata using ontologies in the future. Various initiatives and international projects, such as the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI), Pistoia Alliance, The World Avatar and IUPAC’s Gold Book also presented themselves and their activities.
The highlight of the second day of the workshop was the presentations by Chris Mungall, Janna Hastings and Lutz Weber and the lively discussions that ensued on how to represent and classify chemical substances, samples and species using existing chemical ontologies such as the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) ontologies. In addition to an update on ChEBI, NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Cat also presented their use cases and outlined problems and possible solutions.
The third and last day…
As usual from the last two Ontologies4Chem Workshops, the workshop agenda and the slides of the presentations are freely available. In addition, the recordings of all presentations are available on our NFDI4Chem YouTube channel.
