Natural Language Processing and Information Systems

The abundance of biomedical ontologies is beneficial to the\uddevelopment of biomedical related systems. However, existing biomedical\udontologies such as the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIT),\udFoundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and Systematized Nomenclature\udof Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) are often too large to be\udimplemented in a particular system and cause unnecessary high usage of\udmemory and slow down the system’s processing time. Developing a new\udontology from scratch just for the use of a particular system is deemed as\udinefficient since it requires additional time and causes redundancy. Thus,\uda potentially better method is by reusing existing ontologies. However,\udcurrently there are no specific methods or tools for reusing ontologies.\udThis paper aims to provide readers with a step by step method in reusing\udontologies together with the tools that can be used to ease the process