Debugging Mappings between Biomedical Ontologies: Preliminary Results from the NCBO BioPortal Mapping Repository
Jyotishman Pathak, Christopher G. Chute · Nature Precedings · 2009
The ability to provide semantic mappings between multiple large biomedical ontologies is considered as a very important, albeit labor-intensive and error-prone task. To facilitate such a process, several approaches for collaborative ontology mapping building and sharing have been proposed in the recent past. However, despite the improvements in community-wide mappings development, more often the mapping rules are redundant, incoherent, and at times, incorrect. In this paper, we present an approach for identifying such “erroneous mappings” using Distributed Description Logics. Specifically, we illustrate how logical reasoning can be used to discover semantic inconsistencies caused by erroneous mappings, and provide preliminary results of experiments based on the National Center for Biomedical Ontology BioPortal mapping repository.