Untangling taxonomies and relationships: personal and practical problems in loosely coupled development of large ontologies

ABSTRACT

The GALEN programme has been developing medical ontologies collaboratively for nearly a decade. The ontologies are large and formulated in a specialised description logic, GRAIL. The programme is a broad collaboration of over a dozen groups, most with no prior experience of developing formal ontologies. The programme has developed a methodology for loosely coupled development using layers of intermediate representations, guidelines and tools which minimises training requirements for domain experts and effort by central knowledge engineers. Issues arise both from problems in formal representations and from the idiosyncrasies of the medical domain. Issues dealt with include 'tangled' taxonomies, part-whole and locative relationships, defaults and exceptions, semantic normalisation, and the difference between medical convention and strict logical criteria for correctness.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning
          Subjects: Knowledge acquisition

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Semantic networks; Representations (procedural and rule-based)

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
cooperative development, medical, ontology design, ontology development, very large ontologies