Title
Assessing the practice of biomedical ontology evaluation: Gaps and opportunities
Date Issued
01 April 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
review
Author(s)
Amith M.
He Z.
Bian J.
Tao C.
University of Florida
Publisher(s)
Academic Press Inc.
Abstract
With the proliferation of heterogeneous health care data in the last three decades, biomedical ontologies and controlled biomedical terminologies play a more and more important role in knowledge representation and management, data integration, natural language processing, as well as decision support for health information systems and biomedical research. Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies are intended to assure interoperability. Nevertheless, the quality of biomedical ontologies has hindered their applicability and subsequent adoption in real-world applications. Ontology evaluation is an integral part of ontology development and maintenance. In the biomedicine domain, ontology evaluation is often conducted by third parties as a quality assurance (or auditing) effort that focuses on identifying modeling errors and inconsistencies. In this work, we first organized four categorical schemes of ontology evaluation methods in the existing literature to create an integrated taxonomy. Further, to understand the ontology evaluation practice in the biomedicine domain, we reviewed a sample of 200 ontologies from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal—the largest repository for biomedical ontologies—and observed that only 15 of these ontologies have documented evaluation in their corresponding inception papers. We then surveyed the recent quality assurance approaches for biomedical ontologies and their use. We also mapped these quality assurance approaches to the ontology evaluation criteria. It is our anticipation that ontology evaluation and quality assurance approaches will be more widely adopted in the development life cycle of biomedical ontologies.
Start page
1
End page
13
Volume
80
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Informática y Ciencias de la Información Bioinformática
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85042883208
PubMed ID
Source
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
ISSN of the container
15320464
DOI of the container
10.1016/j.jbi.2018.02.010
Source funding
Foundation for the National Institutes of Health
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
National Institutes of Health BD2K
U.S. National Library of Medicine
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
Sponsor(s)
This research was partially supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 LM011829, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 AI130460, the National Institutes of Health BD2K program under Award Number U01 HG009454, the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U24 CA194215, and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Training Grant #RP160015. The work was also partially supported by National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences under the Clinical and Translational Science Award UL1TR001427 (PI: Nelson & Shenkman). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official view of the funding agencies. This research was partially supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 LM011829 , the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01 AI130460 , the National Institutes of Health BD2K program under Award Number U01 HG009454 , the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number U24 CA194215 , and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Training Grant #RP160015 . The work was also partially supported by National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences under the Clinical and Translational Science Award UL1TR001427 (PI: Nelson & Shenkman). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official view of the funding agencies. Appendix A
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus