An empirical analysis of ontology reuse in BioPortal

Abstract

Biomedical ontologies often reuse content (i.e., classes and properties) from other ontologies. Content reuse enables a consistent representation of a domain and reusing content can save an ontology author significant time and effort. Prior studies have investigated the existence of reused terms among the ontologies in the NCBO BioPortal, but as of yet there has not been a study investigating how the ontologies in BioPortal utilize reused content in the modeling of their own content. In this study we investigate how 355 ontologies hosted in the NCBO BioPortal reuse content from other ontologies for the purposes of creating new ontology content. We identified 197 ontologies that reuse content. Among these ontologies, 108 utilize reused classes in the modeling of their own classes and 116 utilize reused properties in class restrictions. Current utilization of reuse and quality issues related to reuse are discussed.

Exploiting Ontology Recommendation Using Text Categorization Approach

“…Furthermore, many researchers are using the ontology related systems in different fields such as Diagnostics [57], Recommendation and classification [58], [59], IoT security [60], content analysis [61] and opinion mining [62]. However, considering the ontology reuse as a defined design pattern, little or no attention is being paid to the reuse of existing ontologies to reduce the costs [10]. Consequently, reuse and discovery of ontology terms remain a crucial challenge.…”

“…Due to structural support and formal representation of domain schemas [5], ontologies open several opportunities for researchers to automate the processing of web data such as ontology's effect on the system quality [6], heterogeneity, automated information analysis, reusability [7]. The diverse benefits of ontologies enable the research community to explore its use in certain domains such as agriculture, healthcare and information technology [8]- [10]. A frequently used ontology design principle is to reuse the content of existing similar ontologies.…”

“…A huge number of ontologies are available on the Internet with the purpose of reuse instead of building it completely from scratch, such as CMS Ontology 1 , Library Ontology 2 and SNOMED CT Ontology 3 . The reuse of classes, properties, and concepts (ontology components) of an existing ontology according to a user's needs can significantly reduce the cost in terms of time and effort [10]. Due to the availability of a number of ontologies in different domains, searching for an appropriate ontology for its reuse with respect to a user requirement is considered as an ongoing challenge [11].…”

A Known in Advance, What Ontologies to Integrate? For Effective Ontology Merging Using K-means Clustering

“…The problem of querying multiple local ontologies can be resolved by generating global ontologies, which can provide uniform query interface knowledge merging using ontology reuse. Ontology reuse [16] is research problem in the ontology field which consists of processes like merging and integration.…”

Text Mining for Precision Medicine

“…Reusing contents would also guarantee a consistent representation of domain knowledge given the quality of the source ontology. The practice is quite established as part of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) specification and is also supported by the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry (Ochs et al, 2017).…”