Abstract
The biomedical community has developed many ontologies in the last years, which may follow a set of community accepted principles for ontology development such as the ones proposed by the OBO Foundry. One of such principles is the orthogonality of biomedical ontologies, which should be based on the reuse of existing content. Previous works have studied how ontology matching techniques can be used to increase the number of terms reused. In this paper we investigate to what extent the reuse of terms implies to reuse the logical axioms associated with them. For this purpose, our method identifies to different ways of reusing terms, reuse of URI (implicit reuse) and reuse of concept (explicit reuse). The method is also capable of detecting hidden axioms, that is, finding which axioms associated with a reused term are not actually available in the ontology that is reusing such term.
We have developed and applied our method to a corpus of 144 OBO Foundry ontologies. The results show that 75 ontologies do implicit reuse terms, 50% of which also do explicit one. The characterisation based on reuse enables the visualisation of the corpus as a dependency graph that can be clustered for grouping those ontologies with a similar reuse profile. Finally, the application of a locality-based module extractor method reveals that roughly 2000 terms and 20000 hidden axioms, on average, could be automatically included for reusing.
Experimental setup
- Analysis of latest versions of the OBO Foundry Members ontologies in our corpus
- Corpus information (Download XML)
- Results data set (CSV, XML, R script)
- Graph Cluster analysis:
- Figures:
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