Reuse of terminological resources for efficient ontological engineering in Life Sciences

Abstract

This paper is intended to explore how to use terminological resources for ontology engineering. Nowadays there are several biomedical ontologies describing overlapping domains, but there is not a clear correspondence between the concepts that are supposed to be equivalent or just similar. These resources are quite precious but their integration and further development are expensive. Terminologies may support the ontological development in several stages of the lifecycle of the ontology; e.g. ontology integration. In this paper we investigate the use of terminological resources during the ontology lifecycle. We claim that the proper creation and use of a shared thesaurus is a cornerstone for the successful application of the Semantic Web technology within life sciences. Moreover, we have applied our approach to a real scenario, the Health-e-Child (HeC) project, and we have evaluated the impact of filtering and re-organizing several resources. As a result, we have created a reference thesaurus for this project, named HeCTh.

An Ontological Solution to Support Interoperability in the Textile Industry

“…In the simplest approach, it is introduced directly as one of the properties of the concept. Even though the previous scenario seems to be the preferred one by the community, authors in [9,10] propose that ontologies and lexical resources (thesauri in our case) to be kept separated from each other. This organisation enables the reuse of a thesauri by several resources within the same domain.…”

“…On the other hand, domain ontologies integrate complex rules and axioms concerning a particular case of application. [4,9,10] Lexical knowledge (i.e. lexicons, thesauri) has been integrated into ontologies in different ways.…”

Exploitation of Cross-References between Terminological Resources within the CALBC Context

“…Through JoChem we can establish 1-to-1 correspondences (in the most of the cases) to the above integrated databases: 5 Chemical Abstracts Service Registry Number 6 International Chemical Identifier MeSH (21,952), UMLS (54,165), ChemIDPlus (260,393), ChEBI (11,638), CAS (266,658), PUBC (6,425), PUBS (24,157). This will be specially useful considering that CALBC partners use different terminologies to annotate CHED entities (refer to Section 1).…”

A MAUT Approach for Reusing Ontologies

“…http://www. kowien.uni-essen.de/publikationen/konstruktion.pdf) and ontology modules ( [4]); (b) ontology statements and ontology design patterns (ODPs) ( [5], [6]); and (c) non-ontological resources ( [7]), such as thesauri, lexicons, data bases, UML diagrams and classification schemas, such as NAICS {North American Industry Classification System, which provides industry-sector definitions for Canada, Mexico, and the United States to facilitate uniform economic studies across the boundaries of these countries, http://www.census.gov/epcd/ www/naics.html) and SOC {Standard Occupational Classification, which classifies workers into occupational categories: 23 major groups, 96 minor groups, and 449 occupations. http://www.bls.gov/soc/), built by other professionals and which have already gained some acceptance.…”