CTSOC 2026 Annual Meeting
When: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, from 9:30 am–5:30 pm EDT.
Who: The Clinical Translational Science Ontology Consortium (CTSOC) is a consortium of ontology developers and users from across the USA focused on using ontologies to promote the interoperability of biomedical data in clinical translational science.
What: The 2026 CTSOC Meeting is a two-part event with an in-person workshop session in the morning and a hybrid presentation session in the afternoon that will feature a series of talks on leveraging AI and ontologies in translational science. This is the second event in a series (details of the kickoff event are available here.)
Where: Hybrid via Zoom and at the UB's National AI Institute for Exceptional Education (AI4EE) Frontier Space Conference Room, Lockwood Memorial Library, Room 205.
Morning Session
Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 9:30 am–12:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time
| Time | Topic | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 9:30–9:45 | Welcome & Introduction | Barry Smith (UB) |
| 9:45–10:15 | The Translational Science Ontology | Fabrício H. Rodrigues (UB) (slides) |
| 10:15–10:45 | Towards an Ontology of Projects | Christian Sprague (INCOSE) (slides) (recording) |
| 10:45–11:00 | Break | — |
| 11:00–12:00 | Future of Common Data Elements | |
| On the Characteristics of CDEs | Barry Smith (UB) (slides) (recording) | |
| On Creating CDEs for TMD | Richard Ohrbach (UB) (slides) (recording) | |
| The CDE Strategy for the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research | Vidhya Venkateswaran (NIH/NIDCR) (slides) (recording) | |
| Assessing Semantic Similarity in the NIH CDE Repository | Matthew Diller (NLM) (slides) (recording) | |
Afternoon Session
Tuesday, September 15, 2026, 1:00–5:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time
| Time | Topic | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 1:00–1:15 | Welcome & Introduction | Barry Smith (UB) |
| 1:15–1:30 | AI-Driven Advances in Cell Ontology Curation | Alexander Diehl (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 1:30–1:45 | The Where Defines the What: Giving a Cell Label a Referent | Ryan Brinkman (SOULCAP) (slides) (recording) |
| 1:45–2:00 | Ontological Modeling of Maternal Milk Components and their Effect on the Developing Immune System | Emily Steliotes (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 2:00–2:15 | Building a Rehabilitation Ontology for AI-based Evaluation of Therapy Quality | William Hogan (MCW) (slides) (recording) |
| 2:15–2:30 | Treeclimber: An Upper-Level Ontology Alignment Analysis Tool | Sebastian Duesing (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 2:30–2:45 | SEA CDM: Ontology-Supported Study-Experiment-Assay Common Data Model and Databases for Cross-Domain Data Integration and Analysis | Oliver He (UMich) (slides) (recording) |
| 2:45–3:00 | Draft of an Ontology of Liquids | Barry Smith (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 3:00–3:15 | Break | — |
| 3:15–3:30 | Healthy Aging in PHASES | John Beverley (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 3:30–3:45 | FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) in RDF and OWL | Tim Prudhomme (Independent) (slides) (recording) |
| 3:45–4:00 | The Pathology Image Feature Ontology | Sam Border (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 4:00–4:15 | ACCELERATE-BASSO | Yue Yu (Mayo Clinic) (slides) (recording) |
| 4:15–4:30 | Update on the Injury Ontology | Regina Hurley (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 4:30–4:45 | Conversion of the International Classification of Headache Disorders into an Ontology | Ian Reinl (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 4:45–5:00 | Update on the Ontology of Dental Fear and Anxiety | William Duncan (UF) (slides) (recording) |
| 5:00–5:15 | LLM Driven Entity Recognition, Ontology Mapping, and Knowledge Graph Construction for the Orofacial Pain Domain | Moiz Uddin Mohammed (UB) (slides) (recording) |
| 5:15–5:30 | Conclusion | Barry Smith (UB) |
The Clinical Translational Science Ontology Consortium and the Annual Meeting are co-sponsored by the University at Buffalo Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Duke University School of Medicine, University of Florida, University of Michigan, UT Southwestern Medical Center, and Medical College of Wisconsin.