Federated ontology search for the medical domain

Abstract

In this paper we describe a novel methodology for retrieving and combining information from multiple ontologies for the medical domain. In the last decades the number and diversity of available ontologies for the medical domain has grown considerably. The variety and number of such resources available makes the cost to integrate them into an application incremental, often prohibitive for exploratory prototyping, and discouraging for larger-scale integration. Cross-ontology localized merging is proposed as a way to allow for a flexible and scalable solution. This approach also indicates a low maintenance cost and high reusability for different application types within the medical domain © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.