Alignment of the UMLS Semantic Network with BioTop: Methodology and Assessment.

Schulz S, Beisswanger, van den Hoek L, Bodenreider O, van Mulligen EM

Bioinformatics 2009;25(12):i69-i76

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Abstract:

For many years, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic network (SN) has been used as an upper-level semantic framework for the categorization of terms from terminological resources in biomedicine. BioTop has recently been developed as an upper-level ontology for the biomedical domain. In contrast to the SN, it is founded upon strict ontological principles, using OWL DL as a formal representation language, which has become standard in the semantic Web. In order to make logic-based reasoning available for the resources annotated or categorized with the SN, a mapping ontology was developed aligning the SN with BioTop.The theoretical foundations and the practical realization of the alignment are being described, with a focus on the design decisions taken, the problems encountered and the adaptations of BioTop that became necessary. For evaluation purposes, UMLS concept pairs obtained from MEDLINE abstracts by a named entity recognition system were tested for possible semantic relationships. Furthermore, all semantic-type combinations that occur in the UMLS Metathesaurus were checked for satisfiability.The effort-intensive alignment process required major design changes and enhancements of BioTop and brought up several design errors that could be fixed. A comparison between a human curator and the ontology yielded only a low agreement. Ontology reasoning was also used to successfully identify 133 inconsistent semantic-type combinations.BioTop, the OWL DL representation of the UMLS SN, and the mapping ontology are available at http://www.purl.org/biotop/.

Schulz S, Beisswanger, van den Hoek L, Bodenreider O, van Mulligen EM. Alignment of the UMLS Semantic Network with BioTop: Methodology and Assessment. 
Bioinformatics 2009;25(12):i69-i76

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