Semantic Web Dog Food

Presented at: 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008)

by Holger Stenzhorn, Stefan Schulz, Elena Beisswanger, Udo Hahn, László van den Hoek, Erik van Mulligen

The recent flood of data and factual knowledge in biology and medicine requires some principled approaches to their proper analysis and management. A cornerstone in this effort constitutes the precise and complete description of the fundamental entities within this domain. But although this fact is generally accepted, often biomedical ontology developments still do not adhere to some of the basic ontology design principles: For example, even very low-level domain terms lack precise and unambiguous (logical) definitions in many cases. Such issues impede the move towards semantic standardization needed for their intended knowledge managment task. Rather it leads to inconsistencies, fragmentation and overlap both within and inbetween different biomedical ontologies. In light of this we introduce BioTop and ChemTop, two top-domain ontologies containing definitions for the most important, foundational entities necesarry to describe the various phenomena in biology and chemistry. These ontologies can subsequently serve as top-level basis for creating new focused domain ontologies in biomedicine or as aid for aligning or improving existing ones.

Keywords: Biology, Chemistry, Top-Domain Ontology

Resource URI on the dog food server: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/iswc/2008/paper/poster_demo/36

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