Open AccessTurning informal thesauri into formal ontologies: a feasibility study on biomedical knowledge re‐use
Author(s) -
Hahn Udo
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
comparative and functional genomics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1532-6268
pISSN - 1531-6912
DOI - 10.1002/cfg.247
Subject(s) - unified medical language system , computer science , knowledge base , consistency (knowledge bases) , ontology , domain (mathematical analysis) , information retrieval , domain knowledge , inference , resource (disambiguation) , key (lock) , data science , world wide web , knowledge management , artificial intelligence , mathematical analysis , computer network , philosophy , mathematics , computer security , epistemology
This paper reports a large‐scale knowledge conversion and curation experiment. Biomedical domain knowledge from a semantically weak and shallow terminological resource, the UMLS, is transformed into a rigorous description logics format. This way, the broad coverage of the UMLS is combined with inference mechanisms for consistency and cycle checking. They are the key to proper cleansing of the knowledge directly imported from the UMLS, as well as subsequent updating, maintenance and refinement of large knowledge repositories. The emerging biomedical knowledge base currently comprises more than 240 000 conceptual entities and hence constitutes one of the largest formal knowledge repositories ever built. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.