Skip to main content
An official website of the United States government
Government Funding Lapse
Because of a lapse in government funding, the information on this website may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.

The NIH Clinical Center (the research hospital of NIH) is open. For more details about its operating status, please visit cc.nih.gov.

Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at opm.gov.

Email

Biospecimens and Biobanks: Data Annotation

Vocabularies for Biobanking

Medical research requires large-scale data integration on institutional, inter-institutional, and international levels. The data annotation accompanying human specimens is an important part of meeting this data integration challenge. Research institutions often operate multiple biobanks to fulfill diverse research needs, and they may use different data representation and schemata. A biobanking ontology is a formal naming and definition of biobanking terms, procedures and protocols that can enable the effective integration of biobank-related data. Utilizing and/or harmonizing on pre-existing ontological representations may allow researchers to link data from biobanks to other biological and biomedical data repositories. Ontologies are also very important for translational research because of the capability to link data across other disciplines from basic science to clinical research. 

The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry is a collective of ontologies. The mission of the OBO is to develop ontologies that are logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. Within the OBO is the Ontology for Biobanking (OBIB), which was created for the annotation and modeling of biobank repository and biobank management. BBRB, in collaboration with the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) and the OBIB consortium, has worked to create standard terminology and definitions (vocabularies) for biospecimen collection throughout a project life cycle. These vocabularies were used throughout the biospecimen collection and clinical data management that supported the Biospecimen Preanalytical Variables (BPV) and Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) projects. They are now available to the public on the following databases: 

If you would like to reproduce some or all of this content, see Reuse of NCI Information for guidance about copyright and permissions. In the case of permitted digital reproduction, please credit the National Cancer Institute as the source and link to the original NCI product using the original product's title; e.g., “Biospecimens and Biobanks: Data Annotation was originally published by the National Cancer Institute.”

Email