Your browser doesn't support javascript.
loading
Mostrar: 20 | 50 | 100
Resultados 1 - 20 de 29
Filtrar
1.
J Biomed Inform ; 136: 104240, 2022 12.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-36368631

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Surgical context-aware systems can adapt to the current situation in the operating room and thus provide computer-aided assistance functionalities and intraoperative decision-support. To interact with the surgical team perceptively and assist the surgical process, the system needs to monitor the intraoperative activities, understand the current situation in the operating room at any time, and anticipate the following possible situations. METHODS: A structured representation of surgical process knowledge is a prerequisite for any applications in the intelligent operating room. For this purpose, a surgical process ontology, which is formally based on standard medical terminology (SNOMED CT) and an upper-level ontology (GFO), was developed and instantiated for a neurosurgical use case. A new ontology-based surgical workflow recognition and a novel prediction method are presented utilizing ontological reasoning, abstraction, and explication. This way, a surgical situation representation with combined phase, high-level task, and low-level task recognition and prediction was realized based on the currently used instrument as the only input information. RESULTS: The ontology-based approach performed efficiently, and decent accuracy was achieved for situation recognition and prediction. Especially during situation recognition, the missing sensor information were reasoned based on the situation representation provided by the process ontology, which resulted in improved recognition results compared to the state-of-the-art. CONCLUSIONS: In this work, a reference ontology was developed, which provides workflow support and a knowledge base for further applications in the intelligent operating room, for instance, context-aware medical device orchestration, (semi-) automatic documentation, and surgical simulation, education, and training.


Assuntos
Bases de Conhecimento , Salas Cirúrgicas , Fluxo de Trabalho , Simulação por Computador
2.
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak ; 19(Suppl 2): 53, 2019 04 09.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-30961578

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: The traditional Chinese Medicine Language System (TCMLS) is a large-scale terminology system, developed from 2002 on by the Institute of Information of Traditional Chinese Medicine (IITCM). Until now, more than 120,000 concepts, 300,000 terms and 1.27 million semantic relational links are included. Its top-level framework, called TCMLS-semantic network (SN), provides an important basis for the standardization and mapping of traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) terminology systems. Though, many data produced and stored in TCMLS have poor quality for historical reasons or because of human factors. There is a large number of classification errors or inconsistent expressions of terms remained in the current TCMLS- SN, which hamper an efficient utilization of the data stored in TCMLS in practical applications. METHODS: We start with analyzing the technical specification based on TCMLS, considering some obvious classification errors and problems of ambiguity of semantic expressions in TCMLS-SN, followed with using a top-down approach for building a middle level ontology which is based on the framework General Formal Ontology (GFO), take into account the compatibility with TCM related concepts, turn out the results of a modification of the current TCMLS-SN, called GFO-TCM. RESULTS: Through comparison with TCMLS-SN, according to viewpoints of GFO, some semantic types and relations were reconstructed within GFO-TCM. We propose a middle level ontology for TCMLS which may support entailment and ensure coherence, we also draw out a mapping which possess a more reasonable framework with a unified semantic criterion, it is application scenarios oriented and can be further updated and extended. CONCLUSIONS: The goal is to construct a formal middle-level ontology that is compatible with both the traditional medical terminology system and modern medical terminology standards. it is intended to satisfy functional requirements which are relevant for natural language processing, information extraction, semantic retrieval, clinical decision support in the field of traditional Chinese medicine. It also provides a foundation and methodology for building a large-scale, unified semantic and extensible knowledge graph platform.


Assuntos
Bases de Conhecimento , Medicina Tradicional Chinesa , Sistemas de Apoio a Decisões Clínicas , Humanos , Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação , Idioma , Processamento de Linguagem Natural , Semântica
3.
Bioinformatics ; 28(13): 1783-9, 2012 Jul 01.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-22539675

RESUMO

MOTIVATION: The systematic observation of phenotypes has become a crucial tool of functional genomics, and several large international projects are currently underway to identify and characterize the phenotypes that are associated with genotypes in several species. To integrate phenotype descriptions within and across species, phenotype ontologies have been developed. Applying ontologies to unify phenotype descriptions in the domain of physiology has been a particular challenge due to the high complexity of the underlying domain. RESULTS: In this study, we present the outline of a theory and its implementation for an ontology of physiology-related phenotypes. We provide a formal description of process attributes and relate them to the attributes of their temporal parts and participants. We apply our theory to create the Cellular Phenotype Ontology (CPO). The CPO is an ontology of morphological and physiological phenotypic characteristics of cells, cell components and cellular processes. Its prime application is to provide terms and uniform definition patterns for the annotation of cellular phenotypes. The CPO can be used for the annotation of observed abnormalities in domains, such as systems microscopy, in which cellular abnormalities are observed and for which no phenotype ontology has been created. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The CPO and the source code we generated to create the CPO are freely available on http://cell-phenotype.googlecode.com.


Assuntos
Fenômenos Fisiológicos Celulares , Fenótipo , Vocabulário Controlado , Semântica
4.
Methods Inf Med ; 61(S 02): e103-e115, 2022 12.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-35915977

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Clinical trials, epidemiological studies, clinical registries, and other prospective research projects, together with patient care services, are main sources of data in the medical research domain. They serve often as a basis for secondary research in evidence-based medicine, prediction models for disease, and its progression. This data are often neither sufficiently described nor accessible. Related models are often not accessible as a functional program tool for interested users from the health care and biomedical domains. OBJECTIVE: The interdisciplinary project Leipzig Health Atlas (LHA) was developed to close this gap. LHA is an online platform that serves as a sustainable archive providing medical data, metadata, models, and novel phenotypes from clinical trials, epidemiological studies, and other medical research projects. METHODS: Data, models, and phenotypes are described by semantically rich metadata. The platform prefers to share data and models presented in original publications but is also open for nonpublished data. LHA provides and associates unique permanent identifiers for each dataset and model. Hence, the platform can be used to share prepared, quality-assured datasets and models while they are referenced in publications. All managed data, models, and phenotypes in LHA follow the FAIR principles, with public availability or restricted access for specific user groups. RESULTS: The LHA platform is in productive mode (https://www.health-atlas.de/). It is already used by a variety of clinical trial and research groups and is becoming increasingly popular also in the biomedical community. LHA is an integral part of the forthcoming initiative building a national research data infrastructure for health in Germany.


Assuntos
Estudos Prospectivos , Alemanha
5.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 278: 66-74, 2021 May 24.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-34042877

RESUMO

Sharing data is of great importance for research in medical sciences. It is the basis for reproducibility and reuse of already generated outcomes in new projects and in new contexts. FAIR data principles are the basics for sharing data. The Leipzig Health Atlas (LHA) platform follows these principles and provides data, describing metadata, and models that have been implemented in novel software tools and are available as demonstrators. LHA reuses and extends three different major components that have been previously developed by other projects. The SEEK management platform is the foundation providing a repository for archiving, presenting and secure sharing a wide range of publication results, such as published reports, (bio)medical data as well as interactive models and tools. The LHA Data Portal manages study metadata and data allowing to search for data of interest. Finally, PhenoMan is an ontological framework for phenotype modelling. This paper describes the interrelation of these three components. In particular, we use the PhenoMan to, firstly, model and represent phenotypes within the LHA platform. Then, secondly, the ontological phenotype representation can be used to generate search queries that are executed by the LHA Data Portal. The PhenoMan generates the queries in a novel domain specific query language (SDQL), which is specific for data management systems based on CDISC ODM standard, such as the LHA Data Portal. Our approach was successfully applied to represent phenotypes in the Leipzig Health Atlas with the possibility to execute corresponding queries within the LHA Data Portal.


Assuntos
Metadados , Software , Arquivos , Fenótipo , Reprodutibilidade dos Testes
6.
BMC Bioinformatics ; 11: 441, 2010 Aug 31.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-20807438

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: most biomedical ontologies are represented in the OBO Flatfile Format, which is an easy-to-use graph-based ontology language. The semantics of the OBO Flatfile Format 1.2 enforces a strict predetermined interpretation of relationship statements between classes. It does not allow flexible specifications that provide better approximations of the intuitive understanding of the considered relations. If relations cannot be accurately expressed then ontologies built upon them may contain false assertions and hence lead to false inferences. Ontologies in the OBO Foundry must formalize the semantics of relations according to the OBO Relationship Ontology (RO). Therefore, being able to accurately express the intended meaning of relations is of crucial importance. Since the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is an expressive language with a formal semantics, it is suitable to de ne the meaning of relations accurately. RESULTS: we developed a method to provide definition patterns for relations between classes using OWL and describe a novel implementation of the RO based on this method. We implemented our extension in software that converts ontologies in the OBO Flatfile Format to OWL, and also provide a prototype to extract relational patterns from OWL ontologies using automated reasoning. The conversion software is freely available at http://bioonto.de/obo2owl, and can be accessed via a web interface. CONCLUSIONS: explicitly defining relations permits their use in reasoning software and leads to a more flexible and powerful way of representing biomedical ontologies. Using the extended langua0067e and semantics avoids several mistakes commonly made in formalizing biomedical ontologies, and can be used to automatically detect inconsistencies. The use of our method enables the use of graph-based ontologies in OWL, and makes complex OWL ontologies accessible in a graph-based form. Thereby, our method provides the means to gradually move the representation of biomedical ontologies into formal knowledge representation languages that incorporates an explicit semantics. Our method facilitates the use of OWL-based software in the back-end while ontology curators may continue to develop ontologies with an OBO-style front-end.


Assuntos
Biologia Computacional/métodos , Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação/métodos , Semântica , Vocabulário Controlado
7.
J Biomed Semantics ; 11(1): 15, 2020 12 21.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-33349245

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: The successful determination and analysis of phenotypes plays a key role in the diagnostic process, the evaluation of risk factors and the recruitment of participants for clinical and epidemiological studies. The development of computable phenotype algorithms to solve these tasks is a challenging problem, caused by various reasons. Firstly, the term 'phenotype' has no generally agreed definition and its meaning depends on context. Secondly, the phenotypes are most commonly specified as non-computable descriptive documents. Recent attempts have shown that ontologies are a suitable way to handle phenotypes and that they can support clinical research and decision making. The SMITH Consortium is dedicated to rapidly establish an integrative medical informatics framework to provide physicians with the best available data and knowledge and enable innovative use of healthcare data for research and treatment optimisation. In the context of a methodological use case 'phenotype pipeline' (PheP), a technology to automatically generate phenotype classifications and annotations based on electronic health records (EHR) is developed. A large series of phenotype algorithms will be implemented. This implies that for each algorithm a classification scheme and its input variables have to be defined. Furthermore, a phenotype engine is required to evaluate and execute developed algorithms. RESULTS: In this article, we present a Core Ontology of Phenotypes (COP) and the software Phenotype Manager (PhenoMan), which implements a novel ontology-based method to model, classify and compute phenotypes from already available data. Our solution includes an enhanced iterative reasoning process combining classification tasks with mathematical calculations at runtime. The ontology as well as the reasoning method were successfully evaluated with selected phenotypes including SOFA score, socio-economic status, body surface area and WHO BMI classification based on available medical data. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a novel ontology-based method to model phenotypes of living beings with the aim of automated phenotype reasoning based on available data. This new approach can be used in clinical context, e.g., for supporting the diagnostic process, evaluating risk factors, and recruiting appropriate participants for clinical and epidemiological studies.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Informática Médica/estatística & dados numéricos , Sistemas Computadorizados de Registros Médicos/estatística & dados numéricos , Semântica , Algoritmos , Humanos , Informática Médica/métodos , Modelos Teóricos , Fenótipo
8.
BMC Bioinformatics ; 10: 377, 2009 Nov 18.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-19919720

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Biological sequences play a major role in molecular and computational biology. They are studied as information-bearing entities that make up DNA, RNA or proteins. The Sequence Ontology, which is part of the OBO Foundry, contains descriptions and definitions of sequences and their properties. Yet the most basic question about sequences remains unanswered: what kind of entity is a biological sequence? An answer to this question benefits formal ontologies that use the notion of biological sequences and analyses in computational biology alike. RESULTS: We provide both an ontological analysis of biological sequences and a formal representation that can be used in knowledge-based applications and other ontologies. We distinguish three distinct kinds of entities that can be referred to as "biological sequence": chains of molecules, syntactic representations such as those in biological databases, and the abstract information-bearing entities. For use in knowledge-based applications and inclusion in biomedical ontologies, we implemented the developed axiom system for use in automated theorem proving. CONCLUSION: Axioms are necessary to achieve the main goal of ontologies: to formally specify the meaning of terms used within a domain. The axiom system for the ontology of biological sequences is the first elaborate axiom system for an OBO Foundry ontology and can serve as starting point for the development of more formal ontologies and ultimately of knowledge-based applications.


Assuntos
Biologia Computacional/métodos , Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação/métodos , Bases de Dados Factuais , Terminologia como Assunto , Vocabulário Controlado
9.
BMC Bioinformatics ; 10 Suppl 5: S5, 2009 May 06.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-19426462

RESUMO

MOTIVATION: Ontology development and the annotation of biological data using ontologies are time-consuming exercises that currently require input from expert curators. Open, collaborative platforms for biological data annotation enable the wider scientific community to become involved in developing and maintaining such resources. However, this openness raises concerns regarding the quality and correctness of the information added to these knowledge bases. The combination of a collaborative web-based platform with logic-based approaches and Semantic Web technology can be used to address some of these challenges and concerns. RESULTS: We have developed the BOWiki, a web-based system that includes a biological core ontology. The core ontology provides background knowledge about biological types and relations. Against this background, an automated reasoner assesses the consistency of new information added to the knowledge base. The system provides a platform for research communities to integrate information and annotate data collaboratively. AVAILABILITY: The BOWiki and supplementary material is available at http://www.bowiki.net/. The source code is available under the GNU GPL from http://onto.eva.mpg.de/trac/BoWiki.


Assuntos
Biologia Computacional/métodos , Internet , Software , Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Base de Dados , Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação/métodos , Interface Usuário-Computador
10.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 150: 409-13, 2009.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-19745342

RESUMO

The planning of case report forms (CRFs) in clinical trials or databases in registers is mostly an informal process starting from scratch involving domain experts, biometricians, and documentation specialists. The Telematikplattform für Medizinische Forschungsnetze, an umbrella organization for medical research in Germany, aims at supporting and improving this process with a metadata repository, covering the variables and value lists used in databases of registers and trials. The use cases for the metadata repository range from a specification of case report forms to the harmonization of variable collections, variables, and value lists through a formal review. The warehouse used for the storage of the metadata should at least fulfill the definition of part 3 "Registry metamodel and basic attributes" of ISO/IEC 11179 Information technology - Metadata registries. An implementation of the metadata repository should offer an import and export of metadata in the Operational Data Model standard of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium. It will facilitate the creation of CRFs and data models, improve the quality of CRFs and data models, support the harmonization of variables and value lists, and support the mapping of metadata and data.


Assuntos
Ensaios Clínicos como Assunto , Bases de Dados como Assunto/organização & administração , Sistema de Registros
11.
J Biomed Semantics ; 10(1): 16, 2019 10 16.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31619282

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Cell tracking experiments, based on time-lapse microscopy, have become an important tool in biomedical research. The goal is the reconstruction of cell migration patterns, shape and state changes, and, comprehensive genealogical information from these data. This information can be used to develop process models of cellular dynamics. However, so far there has been no structured, standardized way of annotating and storing the tracking results, which is critical for comparative analysis and data integration. The key requirement to be satisfied by an ontology is the representation of a cell's change over time. Unfortunately, popular ontology languages, such as Web Ontology Language (OWL), have limitations for the representation of temporal information. The current paper addresses the fundamental problem of modeling changes of qualities over time in biomedical ontologies specified in OWL. RESULTS: The presented analysis is a result of the lessons learned during the development of an ontology, intended for the annotation of cell tracking experiments. We present, discuss and evaluate various representation patterns for specifying cell changes in time. In particular, we discuss two patterns of temporally changing information: n-ary relation reification and 4d fluents. These representation schemes are formalized within the ontology language OWL and are aimed at the support for annotation of cell tracking experiments. We analyze the performance of each pattern with respect to standard criteria used in software engineering and data modeling, i.e. simplicity, scalability, extensibility and adequacy. We further discuss benefits, drawbacks, and the underlying design choices of each approach. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that patterns perform differently depending on the temporal distribution of modeled information. The optimal model can be constructed by combining two competitive approaches. Thus, we demonstrate that both reification and 4d fluents patterns can work hand in hand in a single ontology. Additionally, we have found that 4d fluents can be reconstructed by two patterns well known in the computer science community, i.e. state modeling and actor-role pattern.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Rastreamento de Células , Fatores de Tempo
12.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 267: 110-117, 2019 Sep 03.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31483262

RESUMO

In the life science domain, experts are usually familiar with spreadsheet software and often use it in their daily work to collect and structure required domain knowledge. The processing and analysis of spreadsheet data is an important task that must be supported by efficient software solutions. A typical application scenario is for example an integration of spreadsheet data (specified or derived) in an ontology to provide reasoning or search. Different converter tools were developed to support a spreadsheet-to-ontology transformation. Such tools allow often only a relatively simple structure of the spreadsheet template or they require complex mapping processes to map the spreadsheet and ontological entities. In many cases, it is impossible to use the existing converter tools because the spreadsheet data must be processed first before the derived data can be integrated into the ontology. In such cases, an efficient and fast development of customized software solutions is of great importance. In this paper, we present a general spreadsheet processing framework to efficiently read and write spreadsheet data. The Spreadsheet Model Generator (SMOG) provides a simple mechanism to automatically generate the Java object model and mappings between object code and spreadsheet entities. Our solution greatly simplifies the implementation of spreadsheet access methods and enables an efficient development of spreadsheet-based applications. The SMOG has already been used successfully in several biomedical projects under real world conditions.


Assuntos
Software
13.
J Biomed Semantics ; 10(1): 9, 2019 05 30.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31146771

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: The vigilant observation of medical devices during post-market surveillance (PMS) for identifying safety-relevant incidents is a non-trivial task. A wide range of sources has to be monitored in order to integrate all accessible data about the safety and performance of a medical device. PMS needs to be supported by an efficient search strategy and the possibility to create complex search queries by domain experts. RESULTS: We use ontologies to support the specification of search queries and the preparation of the document corpus, which contains all relevant documents. In this paper, we present (1) the Search Ontology (SON) v2.0, (2) an Excel template for specifying search queries, and (3) the Search Ontology Generator (SONG), which generates complex queries out of the Excel template. Based on our approach, a service-oriented architecture was designed, which supports and assists domain experts during PMS. Comprehensive testing confirmed the correct execution of all SONG functions. The applicability of our method and of the developed tools was evaluated by domain experts. The test persons concordantly rated our solution after a short period of training as highly user-friendly, intuitive and well applicable for supporting PMS. CONCLUSIONS: The Search Ontology is a promising domain-independent approach to specify complex search queries. Our solution allows advanced searches for relevant documents in different domains using suitable domain ontologies.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Mineração de Dados/métodos , Vigilância de Produtos Comercializados , Equipamentos e Provisões/efeitos adversos , Segurança
14.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 253: 83-87, 2018.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-30147046

RESUMO

Optical navigation systems help surgeons find their way through the complex anatomy of a patient. However, such systems are accident-sensitive, time-consuming and difficult to use because of their complicated technical requirements such as the setting of optical markers and their intraoperative registration. The BIOPASS project, therefore, provides an innovative localisation system for markerless navigation in endoscopic surgery to support medical decision making. This system comprises several machine learning classifiers to recognise anatomical structures visible in the endoscopic images. To verify the data provided by these classifiers and to alert medical staff about surgical risk situations, we developed a new ontology-based software called OntoSun. Our software improves the precision and the sustainable traceability of the classifiers' results and also provides warning messages that increase situational awareness during surgical interventions.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Endoscopia , Aprendizado de Máquina , Software , Conscientização , Humanos , Cirurgia Assistida por Computador
15.
J Biomed Semantics ; 9(1): 16, 2018 05 11.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-29751829

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Legacy data and new structured data can be stored in a standardized format as XML-based EHRs on XML databases. Querying documents on these databases is crucial for answering research questions. Instead of using free text searches, that lead to false positive results, the precision can be increased by constraining the search to certain parts of documents. METHODS: A search ontology-based specification of queries on XML documents defines search concepts and relates them to parts in the XML document structure. Such query specification method is practically introduced and evaluated by applying concrete research questions formulated in natural language on a data collection for information retrieval purposes. The search is performed by search ontology-based XPath engineering that reuses ontologies and XML-related W3C standards. RESULTS: The key result is that the specification of research questions can be supported by the usage of search ontology-based XPath engineering. A deeper recognition of entities and a semantic understanding of the content is necessary for a further improvement of precision and recall. Key limitation is that the application of the introduced process requires skills in ontology and software development. In future, the time consuming ontology development could be overcome by implementing a new clinical role: the clinical ontologist. CONCLUSION: The introduced Search Ontology XML extension connects Search Terms to certain parts in XML documents and enables an ontology-based definition of queries. Search ontology-based XPath engineering can support research question answering by the specification of complex XPath expressions without deep syntax knowledge about XPaths.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Mineração de Dados/métodos , Registros Eletrônicos de Saúde , Software
16.
BMC Bioinformatics ; 8: 377, 2007 Oct 09.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-17925014

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Current efforts within the biomedical ontology community focus on achieving interoperability between various biomedical ontologies that cover a range of diverse domains. Achieving this interoperability will contribute to the creation of a rich knowledge base that can be used for querying, as well as generating and testing novel hypotheses. The OBO Foundry principles, as applied to a number of biomedical ontologies, are designed to facilitate this interoperability. However, semantic extensions are required to meet the OBO Foundry interoperability goals. Inconsistencies may arise when ontologies of properties - mostly phenotype ontologies - are combined with ontologies taking a canonical view of a domain - such as many anatomical ontologies. Currently, there is no support for a correct and consistent integration of such ontologies. RESULTS: We have developed a methodology for accurately representing canonical domain ontologies within the OBO Foundry. This is achieved by adding an extension to the semantics for relationships in the biomedical ontologies that allows for treating canonical information as default. Conclusions drawn from default knowledge may be revoked when additional information becomes available. We show how this extension can be used to achieve interoperability between ontologies, and further allows for the inclusion of more knowledge within them. We apply the formalism to ontologies of mouse anatomy and mammalian phenotypes in order to demonstrate the approach. CONCLUSION: Biomedical ontologies require a new class of relations that can be used in conjunction with default knowledge, thereby extending those currently in use. The inclusion of default knowledge is necessary in order to ensure interoperability between ontologies.


Assuntos
Biologia Computacional/métodos , Vocabulário Controlado , Algoritmos , Anatomia , Animais , Inteligência Artificial , Humanos , Ciência da Informação , Conhecimento , Processamento de Linguagem Natural , Fenótipo , Reprodutibilidade dos Testes , Semântica , Software
17.
Bioinformatics ; 22(14): e66-73, 2006 Jul 15.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-16873523

RESUMO

MOTIVATION: A clear understanding of functions in biology is a key component in accurate modelling of molecular, cellular and organismal biology. Using the existing biomedical ontologies it has been impossible to capture the complexity of the community's knowledge about biological functions. RESULTS: We present here a top-level ontological framework for representing knowledge about biological functions. This framework lends greater accuracy, power and expressiveness to biomedical ontologies by providing a means to capture existing functional knowledge in a more formal manner. An initial major application of the ontology of functions is the provision of a principled way in which to curate functional knowledge and annotations in biomedical ontologies. Further potential applications include the facilitation of ontology interoperability and automated reasoning. A major advantage of the proposed implementation is that it is an extension to existing biomedical ontologies, and can be applied without substantial changes to these domain ontologies. AVAILABILITY: The Ontology of Functions (OF) can be downloaded in OWL format from http://onto.eva.mpg.de/. Additionally, a UML profile and supplementary information and guides for using the OF can be accessed from the same website.


Assuntos
Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Base de Dados , Bases de Dados de Proteínas , Armazenamento e Recuperação da Informação/métodos , Modelos Biológicos , Processamento de Linguagem Natural , Proteínas/classificação , Proteínas/metabolismo , Engenharia Biomédica/métodos , Biologia Computacional/métodos , Proteínas/química , Relação Estrutura-Atividade
18.
J Biomed Semantics ; 8(1): 48, 2017 Oct 04.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-28978337

RESUMO

BACKGROUND: Gene Ontology (GO) is the largest resource for cataloging gene products. This resource grows steadily and, naturally, this growth raises issues regarding the structure of the ontology. Moreover, modeling and refactoring large ontologies such as GO is generally far from being simple, as a whole as well as when focusing on certain aspects or fragments. It seems that human-friendly graphical modeling languages such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) could be helpful in connection with these tasks. RESULTS: We investigate the use of UML for making the structural organization of the Molecular Function Ontology (MFO), a sub-ontology of GO, more explicit. More precisely, we present a UML dialect, called the Function Modeling Language (FueL), which is suited for capturing functions in an ontologically founded way. FueL is equipped, among other features, with language elements that arise from studying patterns of subsumption between functions. We show how to use this UML dialect for capturing the structure of molecular functions. Furthermore, we propose and discuss some refactoring options concerning fragments of MFO. CONCLUSIONS: FueL enables the systematic, graphical representation of functions and their interrelations, including making information explicit that is currently either implicit in MFO or is mainly captured in textual descriptions. Moreover, the considered subsumption patterns lend themselves to the methodical analysis of refactoring options with respect to MFO. On this basis we argue that the approach can increase the comprehensibility of the structure of MFO for humans and can support communication, for example, during revision and further development.


Assuntos
Ontologia Genética , Serviços de Informação , Modelos Teóricos , Unified Medical Language System , Humanos , Semântica , Vocabulário Controlado
19.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 243: 165-169, 2017.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-28883193

RESUMO

The formalization of expert knowledge enables a broad spectrum of applications employing ontologies as underlying technology. These include eLearning, Semantic Web and expert systems. However, the manual construction of such ontologies is time-consuming and thus expensive. Moreover, experts are often unfamiliar with the syntax and semantics of formal ontology languages such as OWL and usually have no experience in developing formal ontologies. To overcome these barriers, we developed a new method and tool, called Expert2OWL that provides efficient features to support the construction of OWL ontologies using GFO (General Formal Ontology) as a top-level ontology. This method allows a close and effective collaboration between ontologists and domain experts. Essentially, this tool integrates Excel spreadsheets as part of a pattern-based ontology development and refinement process. Expert2OWL enables us to expedite the development process and modularize the resulting ontologies. We applied this method in the field of Chinese Herbal Medicine (CHM) and used Expert2OWL to automatically generate an accurate Chinese Herbology ontology (CHO). The expressivity of CHO was tested and evaluated using ontology query languages SPARQL and DL. CHO shows promising results and can generate answers to important scientific questions such as which Chinese herbal formulas contain which substances, which substances treat which diseases, and which ones are the most frequently used in CHM.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Sistemas Inteligentes , Humanos , Internet , Conhecimento , Idioma , Semântica
20.
Stud Health Technol Inform ; 243: 170-174, 2017.
Artigo em Inglês | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-28883194

RESUMO

The amount of ontologies, which are utilizable for widespread domains, is growing steadily. BioPortal alone, embraces over 500 published ontologies with nearly 8 million classes. In contrast, the vast informative content of these ontologies is only directly intelligible by experts. To overcome this deficiency it could be possible to represent ontologies as web portals, which does not require knowledge about ontologies and their semantics, but still carries as much information as possible to the end-user. Furthermore, the conception of a complex web portal is a sophisticated process. Many entities must be analyzed and linked to existing terminologies. Ontologies are a decent solution for gathering and storing this complex data and dependencies. Hence, automated imports of ontologies into web portals could support both mentioned scenarios. The Content Management System (CMS) Drupal 8 is one of many solutions to develop web presentations with less required knowledge about programming languages and it is suitable to represent ontological entities. We developed the Drupal Upper Ontology (DUO), which models concepts of Drupal's architecture, such as nodes, vocabularies and links. DUO can be imported into ontologies to map their entities to Drupal's concepts. Because of Drupal's lack of import capabilities, we implemented the Simple Ontology Loader in Drupal (SOLID), a Drupal 8 module, which allows Drupal administrators to import ontologies based on DUO. Our module generates content in Drupal from existing ontologies and makes it accessible by the general public. Moreover Drupal offers a tagging system which may be amplified with multiple standardized and established terminologies by importing them with SOLID. Our Drupal module shows that ontologies can be used to model content of a CMS and vice versa CMS are suitable to represent ontologies in a user-friendly way. Ontological entities are presented to the user as discrete pages with all appropriate properties, links and tags.


Assuntos
Ontologias Biológicas , Conhecimento , Linguagens de Programação , Semântica
SELEÇÃO DE REFERÊNCIAS
DETALHE DA PESQUISA