Dear OBO colleagues,
I wanted to provide an update on the governance task team.
As you may recall, we proposed to have a set of volunteers do requirements analysis and documentation for the current state of governance within the OBO community. The goal is to help advance OBO as a standards body, inform decision making regarding non-profit status, and create a more efficient and inviting environment for all. The outcome of this task team’s efforts will be a body of information that will be presented to the community. The task team may make recommendations, but it is the community that is expected to make decisions, decide next steps, and determine what to do with the collated information. We will provide updates and make the documentation available in a transparent fashion.
I wanted to introduce and thank our amazing set of volunteers:
Diane Alexander
An information architect for 20+ years with experience in developing developed Data Governance Programs. Diane worked on the design and development of the Enterprise Architecture Governance Program at Bank of America. The EA program included an over-arching layer of governance in an Architecture Review Board, and also governance standards and processes (with a few review architecture checkpoints) to apply at the individual project level. She has been contributing to the FOODON ontology focusing on wine extensions :-).
Melanie Courtot
Melanie has contributed to many ontologies - OBI, IAO, BFO and specific resources such as FLU, AERO etc. She is part of the OBO technical group and contributed to multiple processes and methodologies, including identifier policy, the PURL based system, MIREOT to import selected terms etc. For the last 5 years, she has been at EMBL-EBI - first the Gene Ontology editorial office, then implementation projects such as the GA4GH for which she developed the Data Use Ontology, and the International Hundred Thousand Consortium for which I do human cohort semantic harmonization. She also contributes to other federated cohort projects such as CINECA in Europe, Canada and Africa, or FAIRplus to improve Pharma data quality in Europe.
LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcourtot/
Jane Lomax
Jane has been using and developing OBO ontologies since ~2002 when she worked on the nascent Gene Ontology and other related ontologies like ChEBI, Cell Ontology, Uberon etc. She was involved in the OBO Foundry in the very early days. For the last 5 years she has been working at SciBite, where she helps life-science companies (mainly pharma) to implement FAIR principles, with a significant ontology component. One of their products is an ontology editing platform that facilitates the use of public ontologies and standards. Jane has also been on the International Society of Biocuration executive committee for the last 3 years.
John Graybeal
John has been involved for 17 years in metadata and semantic initiatives, starting with the Marine Metadata community-building project and MMI repository (based on BioPortal backend at the time, and still operational!). John is the technical lead of BioPortal (and CEDAR) under Mark Musen, and recently helped start the OntoPortal initiative. He has led or participated in several standardization efforts in that period. He is especially interested in sustainability and scoping, and would like the task team to consider how to bring about good governance without funding and/or how to get some to support it.
Jonathan Bisson
Jonathan has been using OBO ontologies for ~4 years. He is working on PHO (
https://pho.nprod.net), an ontology (and its knowledge base) for Natural Products Chemistry. He has technical expertise in ontology development / implementation, and is interested in learning more about the philosophical aspects. He is also interested in ways to manage data and getting organizations organized around data questions. Jonathan has been part of governance groups in different structures, one of them being a hackerspace. In that context, Jon has helped the community overcome tensions between "let-me-do-what-I-want", "let-things-as-they-are", and "it-is-not-welcoming-for-people-like-me" sides of things.
And for those that don’t know me and for parity:
Melissa Haendel
A member of the OBO community since ~2005, when I was tasked to develop anatomy and phenotype ontologies for the Zebrafish database ZFIN. I have since led and contributed to many OBO and some non-OBO ontologies, largely in the context of the Monarch Initiative (Uberon, CL, CARO, OBI, HPO, Mondo, VIVO, MAxO, ECTO, SEPIO, etc.). I have helped with OBO principles and policies over the years, most recently the code of conduct and the attribution policy. I also participate in other standards and data harmonization communities such as GA4GH, HL7, ISO, CRDC, OHDSI, etc. I have recently moved to the University of Colorado where I lead a semantic engineering team focused on biomedicine and translational science. I have helped set up governance for a number of consortial organizations, including the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, which is the largest US national EHR data sharing initiative to date.
One idea I have for OBO is to create an OBO governance toolkit analogous to the ODK but essentially a template to help ontology communities establish good governance. In my opinion, OBO governance should be at both a pan-OBO community level and at an individual ontology community level. Feedback on this and any other ideas welcome. Please see the #governance channel in the OBO Slack
here.
Thanks again to all the positive emails and excitement from the community that we have received. Please keep it coming.
Best,
Melissa