University of Murcia (Spain)

The University of Murcia is the largest university in the Region of Murcia with 38,000 students, 16 faculties and about 4000 employees. The Faculty of Computer Science has around 200 teaching and research staff which are organized in internationally recognized research groups. The Knowledge Technologies research group was established in 2003 to specialize in research on Semantic Web technologies, ontology engineering, language technologies and their applications to domains such as biomedicine, education, tourism, finances or agriculture. Most members of the group have a computer science background although the group has also members with medical and biological background. In the field of biomedical informatics, the group has developed pioneering methods for the use of ontologies and natural language processing to support the semantic interoperability of electronic health records, the enrichment and evaluation of quality of biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and the integration of clinical and omics data. The group is the only ICT group member of the Murcian BioHealth Research Institute (IMIB), so facilitating research cooperation with clinicians. The research group has collaborated in initiatives like Semantic HealthNet, is currently involved in projects aiming to generate an interoperability infrastructure for the development of learning health systems, the standardization of gene regulation knowledge, and evaluating the impact of nutrition during pregnancy and early postnatal life on health outcomes.