Stanford Report, November 15, 2006

Musen honored for open-source software

Mark Musen, MD, PhD, professor of medicine (medical informatics), has been awarded the 2006 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics for his long-standing work on Protégé, an open-source software platform that is increasingly being used to organize knowledge online.

The software, which was developed at Stanford, is used to model ontologies—ways of classifying the meanings and hierarchical relationships among terms and concepts in a given subject.

"A large number of people seem to be recognizing the importance of Protégé," Musen said. "It's about to go live at the National Cancer Institute." Indeed, the NCI is switching from a commercial system to Protégé for the management of its clinical oncology and cancer biology ontology. "The big news is that the NIH is really getting on the ontology bandwagon," said Musen.

The Lindberg Award is given by the American Medical Informatics Association to honor those whose work has "dramatically moved or changed the field" of informatics. It was presented Nov. 11 at the AMIA's annual symposium.