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ISSN 1996-1065 [Online]
ISSN 1818-1139 [PRINT] |
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Special Issue October 2009 |
| Title: |
A Flexible Biomedical Ontology Selection Tool |
| Authors: |
Gilbert Maiga and Ddembe Williams |
| Published: |
© IJCIRVol3(1) Special Issue October 2009, PP. 53-66 |
| Language: | English |
Abstract:
The wide adoption and reuse of existing biomedical ontologies available in various libraries is limited by
the lack of suitable tools with metrics for their evaluation by both naïve users and expert ontologists.
Existing evaluation tools perform technical evaluation of the structure of an ontology as presented by its
design and knowledge representation. These find little use in evaluating the processes and representation of
granularity presented by biomedical ontology. In this paper we present an evaluation tool as part of a
flexible framework that enables users to select a suitable biomedical ontology for use in building
applications that integrate clinical and biological data. Requirements for such a tool were elicited in a
descriptive survey using questionnaires, and a prototype developed. The tool also enables ontology
modelers to iteratively elicit new requirements for improving upon existing biomedical ontologies, leading
to new ones that are able to integrate data across structure, processes and granularity. By facilitating
biomedical ontology evaluation, the tool contributes towards reuse of existing biomedical ontologies. This
helps to avoid the need for costly time consuming tasks of developing entirely new biomedical ontologies.
The utility of this tool was demonstrated in experiments that evaluated the infectious disease ontology. The
results were validated using a questionnaire based human assessment.
Categories and Subject descriptors: H. [Information Systems]: H.0.General
General terms: Evaluation Tool; Biomedical Ontology; Ontology Integration; Ontology Selection Tool
Additional key words and phrases: Biological data; Clinical data.View full Article
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