*Abstract*
We, participants in the Translational Medicine Ontology activity of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group ("http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG":http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG) and members of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology ("http://bioontology.org/":http://bioontology.org/), are developing a high-level, patient-centric ontology for translational medicine which will draw on existing domain ontologies and allow the integration of data throughout the drug development process.

*Introduction*
The pharmaceutical industry has historically focused on the development of novel blockbuster drugs.... |