Hi David,

A few quick notes re: OBI

1) OBI = the Ontology of Biomedical Investigation

2) Current public version
* OBI development underwent a major overhaul as of January's bi-annual meeting. This is where a further commitment to building on BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) and the OBO-RO (Open Bioontologies Relation Ontology) was made, as well as the commitment to break development into the branches (). Also at this meeting, we spent time building out each branch down 2 - 3 levels from the BFO superclass - which still is at a very course level of description - e.g., obi:data_normalization is a type of obi:data_transformation is a type of obi:protocol_application is a type of bfo:Process. In this particular case, we went 3 levels down from BFO, because data_normalization was already in the previous version of OBI. This is the current public file (http://obi.sourceforge.net/ontology/OBI....). Since then (January), a HUGE amount of effort has been invested in building out the branches, but these are still at the development stage and are not in the public release. The upcoming OBI meeting will likely lead to a release of some significant portion of this additional content. There has been considerable effort invested in working of how to develop OBI as a modular ontology (i.e., each branch is a distinct OWL file), so this has slowed things a bit. The current tools - Protege v3.x - are a bit idiosyncratic in how they support shared, community development of a modular ontology. For data transformation - and the variety of generically_dependent_entities likely to be relevant to a software ontology of use to NCBCs, to NIF, and to NITRC (see those under OBI:plan and OBI:digital_entity). Again - quite a bit of work has occurred since January to build out some of these branches - e.g., data_transformation (which has only that one sub-class in the current public file) and plan are two I know that have been getting a lot of attention.