Abstract

Hundreds of biomedical ontologies have been produced, with many of the significant, widely used ones being developed in collaborative efforts and following a set of construction principles, which include using a systematic naming convention for their labels. Despite their success, many of these ontologies have lacked a foundation of axioms that would expose the wealth of knowledge in the ontologies to computational reasoning. Our previous results suggest that exploiting the structure on the labels may contribute to an axiomatic enrichment. Hence, in this work we perform a study of the structure of the labels of the ontologies available in BioPortal to classify them in terms of potential interest for axiomatic enrichment.

Keywords: Annotations, biomedical ontologies, lexical analysis, ontology labels, OWL, re-use.

Graphical Abstract