Auditing associative relations across two knowledge sources

Abstract

Objectives This paper proposes a novel semantic method for auditing associative relations in biomedical terminologies. We tested our methodology on two Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) knowledge sources. Methods We use the UMLS semantic groups as high-level representations of the domain and range of relationships in the Metathesaurus and in the Semantic Network. A mapping created between Metathesaurus relationships and Semantic Network relationships forms the basis for comparing the signatures of a given Metathesaurus relationship to the signatures of the semantic relationship to which it is mapped. The consistency of Metathesaurus relations is studied for each relationship. Results Of the 177 associative relationships in the Metathesaurus, 84 (48%) exhibit a high degree of consistency with the corresponding Semantic Network relationships. Overall, 63% of the 1.8M associative relations in the Metathesaurus are consistent with relations in the Semantic Network. Conclusion The semantics of associative relationships in biomedical terminologies should be defined explicitly by their developers. The Semantic Network would benefit from being extended with new relationships and with new relations for some existing relationships. The UMLS editing environment could take advantage of the correspondence established between relationships in the Metathesaurus and the Semantic Network. Finally, the auditing method also yielded useful information for refining the mapping of associative relationships between the two sources.

Ontology alignment in geographical hard-soft information fusion systems

“…Current developments in other communities include biomedical research [33] and web services [34]. These communities have a plethora of articles describing examples of interoperability topics that could be leveraged by the information fusion community.…”

Ontology alignment using relative entropy for semantic uncertainty analysis

“…Examples of such issues are agent communication netcentric warfare [22]. Current developments in other communities include biomedical research [23] and web services [24]. These communities have a plethora of articles describing examples of interoperability topics that could be leveraged by the information fusion community.…”

Enhancing semantic relation quality of UMLS knowledge sources

“…The works in [20][21][22][23], for example, are developed to asses the inconsistencies and ambiguities inherent to UMLS knowledge sources. But, while auditing systems have made large contributions in detecting the inconsistencies and ambiguities, the large volume of the UMLS and many inconsistencies and ambiguities in it [11] [14], makes to have inherent problems in this respect yet.…”

“…Before integrating the three auditing techniques, semantic analysis is made in four perspectives where most inconsistencies are assumed to happen in the UMLS [20][21][22][23]. First, classifications of Metathesaurus concepts into semantic classes (semantic types) are assessed for ensuring the correct assignments of concepts in UMLS [12].…”

“…Thirdly, the associative semantic inconsistencies among UMLS concepts, which are related non-taxonomically, are assessed to guarantee associative relations consistency among semantic triples in the UMLS semantic network and the corresponding triples in the UMLS Metathesaurus [5] [23]. Lastly, align the UMLS knowledge sources' semantics for integration.…”