Thematic series on biomedical ontologies in JBMS: Challenges and new directions

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.