OBO format emerged as a "biologist friendly" alternative to OWL, a Web ontology language, and has quickly become widely accepted in the biomedical community (see OBO Foundry). OBO format has been used to represent a wide variety of biomedical ontologies. It is typically used with OBO-Edit, an open source ontology editor written in Java. One contribution to this open source project is Term Image Plugin, which enables users to view an image that is connected to an ontology term. As part of ongoing collaboration between the School of Computer Science & Informatics and the School of Healthcare Sciences, we have developed an extensive ontology to formally define standard care for the rehabilitation of knee conditions (approximately 2,000 terms). While there are many biomedical ontologies, this particular ontology is the first of its kind in physiotherapy and as such is breaking new ground in healthcare. The ontology includes detailed descriptions of numerous exercises used in physiotherapy of knee conditions. To support easy and unambiguous semantic interpretation of exercises, we found the image plugin most useful and have produced images to illustrate them. However, videos would be much better suited for this purpose.

The purpose of this project is to contribute to this open source project by developing a video plugin for OBO-Edit in Java. The student would expand their programming skills and learn to collaborate with other researchers on open source projects. They would learn about conducting usability studies with users coming from different background (e.g. physiotherapy). They will learn about using ontologies to formally represent knowledge.