Ontology changes-driven semantic refinement of cross-language biomedical ontology alignments

Abstract

Biomedical computational systems benefits from the use of ontologies. However, interconnectivity between these systems is a challenge, specially when the ontologies supporting each system are described in different natural languages. Ontology alignment plays a key role in data exchange. Existing ontology matching approaches usually provide only equivalent type of relation in the generated mappings. In this article, we propose a refinement technique to enable the update of the semantic type of the mapping beyond equivalence. Our approach relies on information from the ontology evolution. Our evaluation considered LOINC releases in different languages. The results demonstrate the usefulness of ontology evolution changes to support the process of mapping refinement.