Why PGO? Industry Leaders on a Common Data Language
The Pharma General Ontology (PGO) Terminology project is building a shared vocabulary for the core concepts in pharma R&D, so that data from different companies, vendors and partners can be connected without costly translation. In these short videos, members of the PGO Steering Committee explain why this work matters to their organizations and to the industry as a whole.
AI Requires a Common Data Language
Why good AI depends on good, consistent data, and how PGO helps.
Data teams still spend most of their time preparing data rather than using it. Steering Committee members describe how a single disease can be recorded in dozens of different ways across one company’s systems, and why that kind of inconsistency causes AI tools to make mistakes. They explain how PGO gives companies an agreed set of terms from the very start. This helps to make data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) at the source and ready for AI, analytics and knowledge graphs.
Optimize Your Data Lifecycle
How shared standards remove the everyday work of translating data
Every time a company buys data from a vendor, works with a contract research organization or collaborates with an academic group, its teams have to rework that data to match their own terms. Steering Committee members describe how a shared, company-neutral reference, a “Rosetta Stone” for pharma data, removes that repeated effort. They explain how it helps teams combine data from many sources to find new insights, and how it gives each company a foundation, validated by experts, on which to build future data and analytics capabilities.
Why a Collective, Shared Solution?
Why no single company can solve this alone, and what members gain from working together
Pharma companies work across the same complex fields, from biology and chemistry to medicines, and they all need their data to mean the same thing. Steering Committee members explain why agreeing on common terms is a task for the whole industry rather than for each company on its own. They describe the value of sitting at one table with peers at different stages of the same journey: staying current, sharing what works, taking lessons back into their own organizations and moving from theory to practice. And the more companies use PGO, the more valuable it becomes for everyone.
Get Involved
PGO is funded and guided by Pistoia Alliance member organizations. To find out how your organization can take part, visit the Pharma General Ontology – Terminology webpage or contact Giovanni Nisato, Project Manager
Speaker affiliations shown in the above videos reflect their affiliations at the time of their contributions to the project.