# BioPortal: An Expansive Knowledgebase of Biomedical Entities and Relations

> **NIH NIH U24** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2023 · $1,073,886

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
The most widely used and most general-purpose knowledgebases in biomedicine are the ontologies that
define the entities and the relationships that are central to different aspects of health care or the life sciences.
When ontologies are brought together in an integrated framework—enabling terms denoting the same or
similar entities to be related to one another and allowing computational infrastructure to operate across
ontologies—then the aggregate collection of ontologies provides additional capabilities for users.
Our group has developed an enormously popular knowledge resource, known as BioPortal, that provides a
unique knowledgebase of nearly all the world’s publicly accessible biomedical ontologies. Adoption of BioPortal
has been remarkable. Each month, more than 75,000 unique users from academia, government, and industry
access the contents of our ontology repository, and our API services more than 16 million requests. At least
7,850 scientific papers mention the use of BioPortal, according to Google Scholar.
We propose the following four specific aims: (1) We will continue to govern and maintain the BioPortal
knowledgebase by enhancing the services that the knowledgebase provides to the biomedical community. (2)
We will improve the efficiency with which users interact with the knowledgebase by creating the BioPortal
Knowledge Graph. The graph—which will be a queryable knowledge resource in its own right—will integrate all
ontologies in the knowledgebase and it will provide links to other knowledge sources, allowing users to perform
expanded queries across all ontologies. (3) We will enable users of BioPortal to make requests for changes or
extensions to ontologies, and to view the history of changes and change requests when ontologies are
managed in Git repositories. The result will be a much more efficient workflow for making suggestions to
ontology developers and the ability to monitor the change history of component ontologies to inform ontology
selection for particular end-user tasks. (4) We will provide enhanced mechanisms to enable users of BioPortal
to search, access, and browse knowledge in remote BioPortal servers. Users no longer will need to know in
advance where particular knowledge might be stored and they will have the ability to easily integrate
knowledge from complementary scientific disciplines stored across a network of servers.
The result will be the world’s most widely accessed knowledgebase of biomedical concepts and relationships—
supporting all other work in semantic technology in biomedicine and making all biomedical knowledgebases
more standardized, more easily integrated, and more FAIR.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10694904
- **Project number:** 5U24GM143402-03
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Mark A Musen
- **Activity code:** U24 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $1,073,886
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-09-27 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10694904

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10694904, BioPortal: An Expansive Knowledgebase of Biomedical Entities and Relations (5U24GM143402-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10694904. Licensed CC0.

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