Quality Assurance of Concept Roles in the National Cancer Institute thesaurus

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-21-2019

Abstract

Ontologies are integral components of many health information processing environments. Hence, quality assurance (QA) of the conceptual content of any ontology is essential. A methodology for facilitating the identification and correction of a kind of error called 'missing-role error' for ontology concepts is presented. Specifically, being a member of the 'null-role set' is used as an indicator that missing-role errors are likely. Our QA methodology was applied to the Biological Process hierarchy, one of the hierarchies of the National Cancer Institute thesaurus (NCIt), a prominent ontology in the biomedical domain. Two hypotheses pertaining to the effectiveness of our QA approach were investigated. Many missing-role errors were discovered and confirmed in our analysis. In comparison to a control sample, our QA approach yielded a statistically significant number of concepts with missing-role errors, confirming our two hypotheses. QA is a critical part of an ontology's life-cycle, and automated or semi-automated tools for supporting this process are invaluable. The presented approach is a useful addition to the arsenal of tools available to QA personnel.

Identifier

85062559785 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781538654880]

Publication Title

Proceedings 2018 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Bibm 2018

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM.2018.8621277

First Page

2001

Last Page

2008

Grant

R01CA190779

Fund Ref

National Institutes of Health

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