Efficient Management of Biomedical Ontology Versions

  • Authors:

  • Toralf Kirsten;Michael Hartung;Anika Groß;Erhard Rahm

  • Affiliations:

  • Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig, and Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology, University of Leipzig,;Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig,;Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig,;Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig, and Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig,

  • Venue:
  • OTM '09 Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: ADI, CAMS, EI2N, ISDE, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent, ODIS, ORM, OTM Academy, SWWS, SEMELS, Beyond SAWSDL, and COMBEK 2009
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Ontologies have become very popular in life sciences and other domains. They mostly undergo continuous changes and new ontology versions are frequently released. However, current analysis studies do not consider the ontology changes reflected in different versions but typically limit themselves to a specific ontology version which may quickly become obsolete. To allow applications easy access to different ontology versions we propose a central and uniform management of the versions of different biomedical ontologies. The proposed database approach takes concept and structural changes of succeeding ontology versions into account thereby supporting different kinds of change analysis. Furthermore, it is very space-efficient by avoiding redundant storage of ontology components which remain unchanged in different versions. We evaluate the storage requirements and query performance of the proposed approach for the Gene Ontology.