The Onto-Med Research Group conducts basic research in formal ontology, designs formal tools for constructing and managing ontologies and develops top level ontologies as well as domain and core ontologies for medicine, bio-medicine and biology, but also for other fields. The Onto-Med group uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining methods from logic, computer science, philosophy and cognitive linguistics.

The Onto-Med group considers Formal Ontology as an evolving science which is concerned with systematically developing axiomatic theories that describe forms, structures, and modes of being at different levels of abstraction and granularity. The roots of formal ontology can be traced back to the philosophical investigations of Aristotle and Plato. Their work was creatively enriched during the early Middle Ages by Islamic philosophers, including Avicenna, renowned as one of the history's greatest thinkers and medical scholars.

The Onto-Med Research Group was founded in 2002 and is a result of a collaboration between the Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics, and Epidemiology (IMISE), University of Leipzig, and the Department of Formal Concepts at the Institute for Informatics (IfI), University of Leipzig.