Methodology for Biomedical Ontology Matching

Abstract

This paper introduces a dissertation project in the field of ontology matching. Ontology matching plays an important role in integration of various systems or in connecting data which use different ontologies. One of the domains where different ontologies are used and where large amount of data is being continuously generated is biomedicine. The goal of the dissertation project is to propose a methodology for matching of biomedical ontologies. The existing projects do not address the topic as a whole. The related projects provide a methodology for ontology matching in general or talk about matching of biomedical ontologies (solely receiving a set of mappings). The thesis should define and address this gap. As biomedical ontologies can be quite specific, the need for a methodology for matching of these ontologies arises. To achieve the goal of the dissertation, the analytic steps come first - literature review of the field of matching of biomedical ontologies, use of the current methodologies and evaluation of their efficiency and their limitations, research of characteristics of biomedical ontologies, evaluation of different matching tools, and evaluation of combined results from multiple matching tools. Then, the formulation of the methodology steps will follow. After the formulation of the methodology, it needs to be evaluated. The evaluation should compare results from the matching process which follows the proposed methodology with the result from another methodology. At the end, some results of the analytic steps are drafted and current work to follow is described.