The Onto-Med Research Group conducts basic research in formal ontology, designs formal tools for constructing and managing ontologies and develops top level ontologies as well as domain and core ontologies for medicine, bio-medicine and biology, but also for other fields. The Onto-Med group uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining methods from logic, computer science, philosophy and cognitive linguistics.

The Onto-Med group considers Formal Ontology as an evolving science which is concerned with systematically developing axiomatic theories that describe forms, structures, and modes of being at different levels of abstraction and granularity. The roots of formal ontology can be traced back to the philosophical investigations of Aristotle and Plato. Their work was creatively enriched during the early Middle Ages by Islamic philosophers, including Avicenna, renowned as one of the history's greatest thinkers and medical scholars.

The Onto-Med Research Group was founded in 2002 and is a result of a collaboration between the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics, and Epidemiology (IMISE), Leipzig University, and the Department of Formal Concepts at the Institute for Informatics (IfI), Leipzig University.

The research is divided in three stages: Foundational Research, Methodological Research, and Applications. The foundational research is devoted to formal ontology and applied logic, the methodological research includes the development of conceptual tools for building and representing of ontologies. The applications are aimed at the development of domain and core ontologies and of software systems.

The main concern of formal ontology is the development and the analysis foundational ontologies and their integration into a unified system. This research draws on philosophy, cognitive science and linguistics. Applied logic is aimed at the formalization of ontologically basic categories and relations and at meta-logical investigations of axiomatic theories.

Methodological research is directed at principles of conceptual modelling, meta-ontological principles, and ontology architectures. Further methodological topics pertain to the structure, definition and specification of categories and to ontology languages.

Applications include the development of domain and core ontologies in the areas of medicine, bio-medicine and life sciences, but also in other areas. Computer-based applications are aimed at the development of software in support of clinical trials, of building and managing of ontologies, and of health care. See our repositories for more information about currently available computer-based applications.

• Core Ontology of Phenotypes (COP) [Git]
• BIOPASS Situation Ontology (BISON) [Git]
• Search Ontology (SON) [J Biomed Semantics]
• GFO-Bio [CVS]
• Risk Identification Ontology (RIO) [J Biomed Semantics]

Feel free to create issues or pull requests in our repositories.