From Lexical Regularities to Axiomatic Patterns for the Quality Assurance of Biomedical Terminologies and Ontologies

Publication date: Available online 14 June 2018 Source:Journal of Biomedical Informatics Author(s): Philip van Damme, Manuel Quesada-Martínez, Ronald Cornet, Jesualdo Tomás Fernández-Breis Ontologies and terminologies have been identified as key resources for the achievement of semantic interoperability in biomedical domains. The development of ontologies is performed as a joint work by domain experts and knowledge engineers. The maintenance and auditing of these resources is also the responsibility of such experts, and this is usually a time-consuming, mostly manual task. Manual auditing is impractical and ineffective for most biomedical ontologies, especially for larger ones. An example is SNOMED CT, a key resource in many countries for codifying medical information. SNOMED CT contains more than 300000 concepts. Consequently its auditing requires the support of automatic methods. Many biomedical ontologies contain natural language content for humans and logical axioms for machines. The ‘lexically suggest, logically define’ principle means that there should be a relation between what is expressed in natural language and as logical axioms, and that such a relation should be useful for auditing and quality assurance. Besides, the meaning of this principle is that the natural language content for humans could be used to generate the logical axioms for the machines. In this work, we propose a method that combines lexical analysis and clustering techniques to (1) ide...
Source: Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Category: Information Technology Source Type: research