An empirical analysis of ontology reuse in BioPortal

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-1-2017

Abstract

Biomedical ontologies often reuse content (i.e., classes and properties) from other ontologies. Content reuse enables a consistent representation of a domain and reusing content can save an ontology author significant time and effort. Prior studies have investigated the existence of reused terms among the ontologies in the NCBO BioPortal, but as of yet there has not been a study investigating how the ontologies in BioPortal utilize reused content in the modeling of their own content. In this study we investigate how 355 ontologies hosted in the NCBO BioPortal reuse content from other ontologies for the purposes of creating new ontology content. We identified 197 ontologies that reuse content. Among these ontologies, 108 utilize reused classes in the modeling of their own classes and 116 utilize reused properties in class restrictions. Current utilization of reuse and quality issues related to reuse are discussed.

Identifier

85020299151 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Journal of Biomedical Informatics

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2017.05.021

ISSN

15320464

PubMed ID

28583809

First Page

165

Last Page

177

Volume

71

Grant

U54HG004028

Fund Ref

National Human Genome Research Institute

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