Querying Biomedical Ontologies in Natural Language using Answer Set Programming.
Halit Erdoğan, Umut Öztok, Yelda Erdem, Esra Erdem · 2010
Recent advances in health and life sciences have led to generation of a large amount of data. To facilitate access to its desired parts, such a big mass of data has been represented in structured forms, like biomedical ontologies. On the other hand, representing ontologies in a formal language, constructing them independently from each other and storing them at different locations have brought about many challenges for answering queries about the knowledge represented in these ontologies. One of the challenges for the users is to be able represent a complex query in a natural language, and get its answers in an understandable form: Currently, such queries are answered by software systems in a formal language, however, the majority of the users lack the necessary knowledge of a formal query language to represent a query; moreover, none of these systems can provide informative explanations about the answers. Another challenge is to be able to answer complex queries that require appropriate integration of relevant knowledge stored in different places and in various forms. In this work, we address the first challenge by developing an intelligent user interface that allows users to enter biomedical queries in a natural language, and that