An Evaluation of Ontology Exchange Languages for Bioinformatics

Ontologies are specifications of the concepts in a given field, and of the relationships among those concepts. The development of ontologies for molecular-biology information and the sharing of those ontologies within the bioinformatics community are central problems in bioinformatics. If the bioinformatics community is to share ontologies effectively, ontologies must be exchanged in a form that uses standardized syntax and semantics. This paper reports on an effort among the authors to evaluate alternative ontology-exchange languages, and to recommend one or more languages for use within the larger 1 bioinformatics community. The study selected a set of candidate languages, and defined a set of capabilities that the ideal ontology-exchange language should satisfy. The study scored the languages according to the degree to which they satisfied each capability. In addition, the authors performed several ontology-exchange experiments with the two languages that received the highest score...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ISMB
• Authors: Robin McEntire, Peter D. Karp, Neil F. Abernethy, David Benton, Gregg Helt, Matt DeJongh, Robert Kent, Anthony Kosky, Suzanna Lewis, Dan Hodnett, Eric P. Neumann, Frank Olken, Dhiraj K. Pathak, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, Luca Toldo, Thodoros Topaloglou
• Keywords: Bioinformatics Community, Computational Biology, ISMB 2000, Ontologies, Ontology-exchange Language