NCBO Ontology Recommender 2.0: An Enhanced Approach for Biomedical Ontology Recommendation

Biomedical researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new version of the NCBO Ontology Recommender. Called Ontology Recommender 2.0, it uses a new recommendation approach that evaluates the relevance of an ontology to biomedical text data according to four criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the input data; (2) the acceptance of the ontology in the biomedical community; (3) the level of detail of the ontology classes that cover the input data; and (4) the specialization of the ontology to the domain of the input data. Our evaluation shows that the enhanced recommender provides higher quality suggestions than the original approach, providing better coverage of the input data, more detailed information about their concepts, increased specialization for the domain of the input data, and greater acceptance and use in the community. In addition, it provides users with more explanatory information, along with suggestions of not only individual ontologies but also groups of ontologies. It also can be customized to fit the needs of different scenarios. Ontology Recommender 2.0 combines the strengths of its predecessor with a range of adjustments and new features that improve its reliability and usefulness. Ontology Recommender 2.0 recommends over 500 biomedical ontologies from the NCBO BioPortal platform, where it is openly available.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures, 11 table

Selected papers from the 15th Annual Bio-Ontologies special interest group meeting

© 2013 Soldatova et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Over the 15 years, the Bio-Ontologies SIG at ISMB has provided a forum for discussion of the latest and most innovative research in the bio-ontologies development, its applications to biomedicine and more generally the organisation, presentation and dissemination of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences. The seven papers and the commentary selected for this supplement span a wide range of topics including: web-based querying over multiple ontologies, integration of data, annotating patent records, NCBO Web services, ontology developments for probabilistic reasoning and for physiological processes, and analysis of the progress of annotation and structural GO changes

In no uncertain terms : a dataset for monolingual and multilingual automatic term extraction from comparable corpora

Automatic term extraction is a productive field of research within natural language processing, but it still faces significant obstacles regarding datasets and evaluation, which require manual term annotation. This is an arduous task, made even more difficult by the lack of a clear distinction between terms and general language, which results in low inter-annotator agreement. There is a large need for well-documented, manually validated datasets, especially in the rising field of multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora, which presents a unique new set of challenges. In this paper, a new approach is presented for both monolingual and multilingual term annotation in comparable corpora. The detailed guidelines with different term labels, the domain- and language-independent methodology and the large volumes annotated in three different languages and four different domains make this a rich resource. The resulting datasets are not just suited for evaluation purposes but can also serve as a general source of information about terms and even as training data for supervised methods. Moreover, the gold standard for multilingual term extraction from comparable corpora contains information about term variants and translation equivalents, which allows an in-depth, nuanced evaluation

Mining clinical attributes of genomic variants through assisted literature curation in Egas

The veritable deluge of biological data over recent years has led to the establishment of a considerable number of knowledge resources that compile curated information extracted from the literature and store it in structured form, facilitating its use and exploitation. In this article, we focus on the curation of inherited genetic variants and associated clinical attributes, such as zygosity, penetrance or inheritance mode, and describe the use of Egas for this task. Egas is a web-based platform for text-mining assisted literature curation that focuses on usability through modern design solutions and simple user interactions. Egas offers a flexible and customizable tool that allows defining the concept types and relations of interest for a given annotation task, as well as the ontologies used for normalizing each concept type. Further, annotations may be performed on raw documents or on the results of automated concept identification and relation extraction tools. Users can inspect, correct or remove automatic text-mining results, manually add new annotations, and export the results to standard formats. Egas is compatible with the most recent versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari and is available for use at https://demo.bmd-software.com/egas/