Discovering Evolving Regions in Life Science Ontologies

Ontologies are heavily used in life sciences and evolve continuously to incorporate new or changed insights. Often ontology changes affect only specific parts (regions) of ontologies making it valuable for ontology users and applications to know the heavily changed regions on the one hand and stable regions on the other hand. However, the size and complexity of life science ontologies renders manual approaches to localize changing or stable regions impossible. We therefore propose an approach to automatically discover evolving or stable ontology regions. We evaluate the approach by studying evolving regions in the Gene Ontology and the NCI Thesaurus.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DILS
• Authors: Michael Hartung, Anika Gross, Toralf Kirsten, Erhard Rahm
• Keywords: Life Sciences, DILS 2010, Ontologies, Ontology, Stable Regions