Ontologies have been in use for over a decade in many different scientific and technological areas. They provide a basis for sharing conceptual views on a specific domain, giving a uniform coherence that has been quite useful for technological issues such as database integration, text and data mining, information retrieval and others. The huge development of the WWW has contributed to their development, being a great support for knowledge share and reuse.

As regards to biomedicine, ontological development has contributed to provide formal foundations to classical controlled vocabularies and terminologies, leading to achievements such as the Foundational Model of Anatomy, Gene Ontology or the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) initiative. For instance, they can provide references models that are very useful for biomedical research and knowledge management. This keynote is devoted to provide a general overview of the different approaches made in biomedicine, from public health informatics to systems biology, with concrete examples. Over the last years a new area, nanomedicine, is being developed with great expectations, also for ontological development. In such scenario, ontologies will surely contribute to provide approaches for topics such as systems interoperability, data sharing, information extraction, knowledge discovery and others that will accelerate future developments in the area, as it happened with all the "omics" projects, anticipating their particular research agendas. A new area, nanoinformatics, will have a decisive participation in such progress.