title: Thematic series on biomedical ontologies in JBMS: challenges and new directions.
abstract: Over the past 15 years, the biomedical research community has increased its efforts to produce ontologies encoding biomedical knowledge, and to provide the corresponding infrastructure to maintain them. As ontologies are becoming a central part of biological and biomedical research, a communication channel to publish frequent updates and latest developments on them would be an advantage. Here, we introduce the JBMS thematic series on Biomedical Ontologies. The aim of the series is to disseminate the latest developments in research on biomedical ontologies and provide a venue for publishing newly developed ontologies, updates to existing ontologies as well as methodological advances, and selected contributions from conferences and workshops. We aim to give this thematic series a central role in the exploration of ongoing research in biomedical ontologies and intend to work closely together with the research community towards this aim. Researchers and working groups are encouraged to provide feedback on novel developments and special topics to be integrated into the existing publication cycles.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Llandinam Building, SY23 3DB Aberystwyth, UK.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hoehndorf
authors.affiliation: OHSU Library and Department of Medical Informatics, Portland, Oregon, USA ; Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon, USA.
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Haendel
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL Manchester, UK.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stevens
authors.affiliation: Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zürich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland ; European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK.
authors.forename: Dietrich
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rebholz-Schuhmann