Current Status of Biomedical Ontologies: Developments in 2006

The goal of this paper is to survey existing biomedical ontologies and their developments in 2006. This paper discusses features of biomedical ontologies that allow true information integration in biomedical domain. The paper is compilation of several biomedical ontologies like UMLS, Gene Ontology, Protein Ontology, MGED Ontology, and TAMBIS Ontology that have developed, often reflecting mere relations of 'association' between what are called 'concepts', and serving primarily the purposes of information extraction from on-line biomedical literature and databases.