A methodology for biomedical ontology reuse

Abstract

The abundance of biomedical ontologies is beneficial to the development of biomedical related systems. However, existing biomedical ontologies such as the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIT), Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) are often too large to be implemented in a particular system and cause unnecessary high usage of memory and slow down the system’s processing time. Developing a new ontology from scratch just for the use of a particular system is deemed as inefficient since it requires additional time and causes redundancy. Thus, a potentially better method is by reusing existing ontologies. However, currently there are no specific methods or tools for reusing ontologies. This paper aims to provide readers with a step by step method in reusing ontologies together with the tools that can be used to ease the process.