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This is a scenario based on evaluating and enriching the NanoParticle Ontology (NPO) (posted on GForge for the ICRi workgroup). The NanoParticle Ontology (posted on GForge for the ICRi workgroup) is an ontology which is being developed at Washington University in St. Louis to serve as a reference source of controlled vocabularies and terminologies in cancer nanotechnology research. Concepts in the NPO have their instances in the data represented in a database or in literature. In a database, these instances include field names, field entries, or both for the data model. The NPO represents the knowledge supporting unambiguous annotation and semantic interpretation of data in a database or in the literature. To expedite the development of the NPO, object models must be developed to capture the concepts and inter-concept relationships from the literature. Minimum information standards should provide guidelines for developing these object models, so the minimum information is also captured for representation in the NPO.

Nanotechnology is being applied to clinical therapeutics, but this use case could be extended to development of any specialized therapeutics. There are various pre-existing databases holding experimental data that need to be accessible across the entire community to facilitate rational nanomaterial design. Two strategies are being employed. The first is to establish semantic interoperability by finding areas of semantic overlap in the current database models based on controlled vocabularies (NCI Thesaurus, NCI Metathesaurus, Nanoparticle Ontology). The second is to develop a data submission standard based on the extension of standardized models (Biomedical Research Integrated Domain Group (BRIDG), Life Sciences Domain Analysis Model (LS-DAM)) where extensions are supported by controlled vocabularies. New vocabulary is needed to support both of these strategies. New concepts are curated in the controlled vocabularies as appropriate and term definitions are reviewed by the community.