What Four Million Mappings Can Tell You about Two Hundred Ontologies

The field of biomedicine has embraced the Semantic Web probably more than any other field. As a result, there is a large number of biomedical ontologies covering overlapping areas of the field. We have developed BioPortal— an open community-based repository of biomedical ontologies. We analyzed ontologies and terminologies in BioPortal and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), creating more than 4 million mappings between concepts in these ontologies and terminologies based on the lexical similarity of concept names and synonyms. We then analyzed the mappings and what they tell us about the ontologies themselves, the structure of the ontology repository, and the ways in which the mappings can help in the process of ontology design and evaluation. For example, we can use the mappings to guide users who are new to a field to the most pertinent ontologies in that field, to identify areas of the domain that are not covered sufficiently by the ontologies in the repository, an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SEMWEB
• Authors: Amir Ghazvinian, Natalya Fridman Noy, Clement Jonquet, Nigam H. Shah, Mark A. Musen
• Keywords: Biomedical Ontologies, Internet Technology, Mappings, Ontologies, SEMWEB 2009