The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) is a biomedical ontology in the domain of biological and clinical statistics. OBCS is primarily targeted for statistical term representation in the fields in biological, biomedical, and clinical domains.

OBCS uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the upper level ontology. OBCS imports all biostatistics related terms in the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) including all logical axioms. 138 new statistics terms have been generated with the "OBCS_" prefix.

OBCS was initiated with an ANOVA meta-analysis of vaccine protection assay, which was presented in the Bio-Ontologies 2010 conference (2). Many statistics-related terms (e.g., ANOVA, survival rate analysis) were added into OBI at that time. Many more statistics terms have been added into OBCS with original name of "OBIstat" and discussed in the OBI face-to-face workshop in Ann Arbor in May 2012 (3).

The OBCS development is driven by many applications including vaccine research statistics study, and nursing clinical statistical data collection and analysis.

The latest release version of OBCS is available on:

• Ontobee website: http://www.ontobee.org/browser/index.php?o=OBCS
• Bioportal website: http://purl.bioontology.org/ontology/OBCS

References:

Please cite the following reference for OBCS:

Zheng J, Harris MR, Masci AM, Lin Y, Hero A, Smith B, He Y. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) for Standardized and Reproducible Statistical Analysis. J Biomed Semantics. 2016. Sep 14;7(1):53. PMID: 27627881. PMCID: PMC5024438.

More OBCS related papers:

Zheng J, Li H, Liu Q, He Y. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS)-based statistical method standardization and meta-analysis of host responses to yellow fever vaccines. Quantitative Biology. In press.

Zheng J, Harris MR, Masci AM, Lin Y, Hero A, Smith B, He Y. OBCS: The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics. International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO), Houston, Texas, USA. October 6-9, 2014. Full-length proceeding paper.

He Y, Xiang Z, Todd T, Courtot M, Brinkman R, Zheng J, Stoeckert CJ, Malone J, Rocca-Serra P, Sansone S, Fostel J, Soldatova LN, Peters B, Rutternberg A. Ontology representation and ANOVA analysis of vaccine protection investigation. Proceeding of Bio-Ontologies 2010: Semantic Applications in Life Sciences, ISMB, July 9-10, 2010. Boston, MA, USA. Full length paper

OBI workshop presentation and related documents OBCS documents