<abstract> <p>With an increasing number of biomedical ontologies being evolved independently, matching these ontologies to solve the interoperability problem has become a critical issue in biomedical applications. Traditional biomedical ontology matching methods are mostly based on rules or similarities for concepts and properties. These approaches require manually designed rules that not only fail to address the heterogeneity of domain ontology terminology and the ambiguity of multiple meanings of words, but also make it difficult to capture structural information in ontologies that contain a large amount of semantics during matching. Recently, various knowledge graph (KG) embedding techniques utilizing deep learning methods to deal with the heterogeneity in knowledge graphs (KGs), have quickly gained massive attention. However, KG embedding focuses mainly on entity alignment (EA). EA tasks and ontology matching (OM) tasks differ dramatically in terms of matching elements, semantic information and application scenarios, etc., hence these methods cannot be applied directly to biomedical ontologies that contain abstract concepts but almost no entities. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a novel approach called BioOntGCN that directly learns embeddings of ontology-pairs for biomedical ontology matching. Specifically, we first generate a pair-wise connectivity graph (PCG) of two ontologies, whose nodes are concept-pairs and edges correspond to property-pairs. Subsequently, we learn node embeddings of the PCG to predicate the matching results through following phases: 1) A convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the similarity feature vectors of nodes; 2) A graph convolutional network (GCN) to propagate the similarity features and obtain the final embeddings of concept-pairs. Consequently, the biomedical ontology matching problem is transformed into a binary classification problem. We conduct systematic experiments on real-world biomedical ontologies in Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI), and the results show that our approach significantly outperforms other entity alignment methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. This indicates that BioOntGCN is more applicable to ontology matching than the EA method. At the same time, BioOntGCN substantially achieves superior performance compared with previous ontology matching (OM) systems, which suggests that BioOntGCN based on the representation learning is more effective than the traditional approaches.</p> </abstract>
Background Ontology matching seeks to find semantic correspondences between ontologies. With an increasing number of biomedical ontologies being developed independently, matching these ontologies to solve the interoperability problem has become a critical task in biomedical applications. However, some challenges remain. First, extracting and constructing matching clues from biomedical ontologies is a nontrivial problem. Second, it is unknown whether there are dominant matchers while matching biomedical ontologies. Finally, ontology matching also suffers from computational complexity owing to the large-scale sizes of biomedical ontologies. Objective To investigate the effectiveness of matching clues and composite match approaches, this paper presents a spectrum of matchers with different combination strategies and empirically studies their influence on matching biomedical ontologies. Besides, extended reduction anchors are introduced to effectively decrease the time complexity while matching large biomedical ontologies. Methods In this paper, atomic and composite matching clues are first constructed in 4 dimensions: terminology, structure, external knowledge, and representation learning. Then, a spectrum of matchers based on a flexible combination of atomic clues are designed and utilized to comprehensively study the effectiveness. Besides, we carry out a systematic comparative evaluation of different combinations of matchers. Finally, extended reduction anchor is proposed to significantly alleviate the time complexity for matching large-scale biomedical ontologies. Results Experimental results show that considering distinguishable matching clues in biomedical ontologies leads to a substantial improvement in all available information. Besides, incorporating different types of matchers with reliability results in a marked improvement, which is comparative to the state-of-the-art methods. The dominant matchers achieve F1 measures of 0.9271, 0.8218, and 0.5 on Anatomy, FMA-NCI (Foundation Model of Anatomy-National Cancer Institute), and FMA-SNOMED data sets, respectively. Extended reduction anchor is able to solve the scalability problem of matching large biomedical ontologies. It achieves a significant reduction in time complexity with little loss of F1 measure at the same time, with a 0.21% decrease on the Anatomy data set and 0.84% decrease on the FMA-NCI data set, but with a 2.65% increase on the FMA-SNOMED data set. Conclusions This paper systematically analyzes and compares the effectiveness of different matching clues, matchers, and combination strategies. Multiple empirical studies demonstrate that distinguishing clues have significant implications for matching biomedical ontologies. In contrast to the matchers with single clue, those combining multiple clues exhibit more stable and accurate performance. In addition, our results provide evidence that the approach based on extended reduction anchors performs well for large ontology matching tasks, demonstrating an effective solution for the problem.
BACKGROUND Ontology matching seeks to find semantic correspondences between ontologies. With an increasing number of biomedical ontologies being developed independently, matching these ontologies to solve the interoperability problem has become a critical task in biomedical applications. However, some challenges remain. First, extracting and constructing matching clues from biomedical ontologies is a nontrivial problem. Second, it is unknown whether there are dominant matchers while matching biomedical ontologies. Finally, ontology matching also suffers from computational complexity owing to the large-scale sizes of biomedical ontologies. OBJECTIVE To investigate the effectiveness of matching clues and composite match approaches, this paper presents a spectrum of matchers with different combination strategies and empirically studies their influence on matching biomedical ontologies. Besides, extended reduction anchors are introduced to effectively decrease the time complexity while matching large biomedical ontologies. METHODS In this paper, atomic and composite matching clues are first constructed in 4 dimensions: terminology, structure, external knowledge, and representation learning. Then, a spectrum of matchers based on a flexible combination of atomic clues are designed and utilized to comprehensively study the effectiveness. Besides, we carry out a systematic comparative evaluation of different combinations of matchers. Finally, extended reduction anchor is proposed to significantly alleviate the time complexity for matching large-scale biomedical ontologies. RESULTS Experimental results show that considering distinguishable matching clues in biomedical ontologies leads to a substantial improvement in all available information. Besides, incorporating different types of matchers with reliability results in a marked improvement, which is comparative to the state-of-the-art methods. The dominant matchers achieve F1 measures of 0.9271, 0.8218, and 0.5 on Anatomy, FMA-NCI (Foundation Model of Anatomy-National Cancer Institute), and FMA-SNOMED data sets, respectively. Extended reduction anchor is able to solve the scalability problem of matching large biomedical ontologies. It achieves a significant reduction in time complexity with little loss of F1 measure at the same time, with a 0.21% decrease on the Anatomy data set and 0.84% decrease on the FMA-NCI data set, but with a 2.65% increase on the FMA-SNOMED data set. CONCLUSIONS This paper systematically analyzes and compares the effectiveness of different matching clues, matchers, and combination strategies. Multiple empirical studies demonstrate that distinguishing clues have significant implications for matching biomedical ontologies. In contrast to the matchers with single clue, those combining multiple clues exhibit more stable and accurate performance. In addition, our results provide evidence that the approach based on extended reduction anchors performs well for large ontology matching tasks, demonstrating an effective solution for the problem.
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