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Turning Informal Thesauri Into Formal Ontologies: A Feasibility Study on Biomedical Knowledge re-Use

This paper reports a large-scale knowledge conversion and curation experiment. Biomedical domain knowledge from a semantically weak and shallow terminological resource, the UMLS, is transformed into a rigorous description logics format. This way, the broad coverage of the UMLS is combined with infer...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Hahn, Udo
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2003
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2447399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18629112
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cfg.247
Descripción
Sumario:This paper reports a large-scale knowledge conversion and curation experiment. Biomedical domain knowledge from a semantically weak and shallow terminological resource, the UMLS, is transformed into a rigorous description logics format. This way, the broad coverage of the UMLS is combined with inference mechanisms for consistency and cycle checking. They are the key to proper cleansing of the knowledge directly imported from the UMLS, as well as subsequent updating, maintenance and refinement of large knowledge repositories. The emerging biomedical knowledge base currently comprises more than 240 000 conceptual entities and hence constitutes one of the largest formal knowledge repositories ever built.