Experience in Aligning Anatomical Ontologies

An ontology is a formal representation of a domain modeling the entities in the domain and their relations. When a domain is represented by multiple ontologies, there is need for creating mappings among these ontologies in order to facilitate the integration of data annotated with these ontologies and reasoning across ontologies. The objective of this paper is to recapitulate our experience in aligning large anatomical ontologies and to reflect on some of the issues and challenges encountered along the way. The four anatomical ontologies under investigation are the Foundational Model of Anatomy, GALEN, the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary and the NCI Thesaurus. Their underlying representation formalisms are all different. Our approach to aligning concepts (directly) is automatic, rulebased, and operates at the schema level, generating mostly point-to-point mappings. It uses a combination of domain-specific lexical techniques and structural and semantic techniques (to validate the map...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJSWIS
• Authors: Songmao Zhang, Olivier Bodenreider
• Keywords: Anatomical Ontologies, IJSWIS 2007, Large Anatomical Ontologies, Ontologies