TY - JOUR
T1 - Quality assurance of ontology content reuse
AU - Halper, Michael
AU - Ochs, Christopher
AU - Perl, Yehoshua
AU - Arabandi, Sivaram
AU - Musen, Mark A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01CA190779. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health.
Funding Information:
I. INTRODUCTION Ontology reuse is a well-established design pattern. An ontology author may reuse content to save on development time and effort, promote interoperability with other ontologies, and ensure that a consistent representation of a domain is included in their ontology. Support for importing and reusing ontology content is included in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (through the use of owl:imports axioms) [1], and the paradigm is supported by the Protégé ontology editing environment [2]. Top-level ontologies such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) [3] were designed specifically to support content reuse and alignment of ontologies. Top-domain ontologies, like the Ontology for General Medical Sciences (OGMS) [4] and BioTop [5], extend the BFO and add general domain knowledge that can also be reused by an ontology author.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 CEUR-WS.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Building ontologies is difficult and time-consuming. As such, content reuse has been promoted as an important guiding principle in ontology development. Reusing content from other ontologies can reduce the overall effort involved in new ontology construction and provide better alignment with existing knowledge modeling. However, reuse is not a panacea, and it comes with its own attendant difficulties. In this paper, we investigate some common quality assurance issues associated with reuse, such as duplicated content and versioning problems. Some heuristic-based approaches are proposed for analyzing ontologies for these kinds of quality assurance issues. An analysis is carried out on a sample of the large collection of BioPortal-hosted ontologies, many of which employ reuse. The findings indicate that curators and authors, particularly those new to the reuse process, should be on the alert when developing an ontology with reused content to avoid introducing problems into their own ontologies.
AB - Building ontologies is difficult and time-consuming. As such, content reuse has been promoted as an important guiding principle in ontology development. Reusing content from other ontologies can reduce the overall effort involved in new ontology construction and provide better alignment with existing knowledge modeling. However, reuse is not a panacea, and it comes with its own attendant difficulties. In this paper, we investigate some common quality assurance issues associated with reuse, such as duplicated content and versioning problems. Some heuristic-based approaches are proposed for analyzing ontologies for these kinds of quality assurance issues. An analysis is carried out on a sample of the large collection of BioPortal-hosted ontologies, many of which employ reuse. The findings indicate that curators and authors, particularly those new to the reuse process, should be on the alert when developing an ontology with reused content to avoid introducing problems into their own ontologies.
KW - BioPortal
KW - Modeling
KW - Ontology
KW - Ontology quality assurance
KW - Ontology reuse
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85059837022
SN - 1613-0073
VL - 2285
JO - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
JF - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
T2 - 9th International Conference on Biological Ontology, ICBO 2018
Y2 - 7 August 2018 through 10 August 2018
ER -