Challenges for ontology repositories and applications to biomedicine & agronomy

International audienceThe explosion of the number of ontologies and vocabularies available in the Semantic Web makes ontology libraries and repositories mandatory to find and use them. Their functionalities span from simple on-tology listing with more or less of metada-ta description to portals with advanced on-tology-based services: browse, search, vis-ualization, metrics, annotation, etc. Ontol-ogy libraries and repositories are usually developed to address certain needs and communities. BioPortal, the ontology repository built by the US National Center for Biomedical Ontologies BioPortal relies on a domain independent technology already reused in several projects from bio-medicine to agronomy and earth sciences. In this position paper, we describe six high level challenges for ontology repositories: metadata & selection, multilingualism, alignment, new generic ontology-based services, annotations & linked data, and interoperability & scalability. Then, we present some propositions to address these challenges and point to our previously published work and results obtained within applications –reusing NCBO technology– to biomedicine and agronomy in the context of the NCBO, SIFR and AgroPortal projects

Challenges for ontology repositories and applications to biomedicine & agronomy

International audienceThe explosion of the number of ontologies and vocabularies available in the Semantic Web makes ontology libraries and repositories mandatory to find and use them. Their functionalities span from simple on-tology listing with more or less of metada-ta description to portals with advanced on-tology-based services: browse, search, vis-ualization, metrics, annotation, etc. Ontol-ogy libraries and repositories are usually developed to address certain needs and communities. BioPortal, the ontology repository built by the US National Center for Biomedical Ontologies BioPortal relies on a domain independent technology already reused in several projects from bio-medicine to agronomy and earth sciences. In this position paper, we describe six high level challenges for ontology repositories: metadata & selection, multilingualism, alignment, new generic ontology-based services, annotations & linked data, and interoperability & scalability. Then, we present some propositions to address these challenges and point to our previously published work and results obtained within applications –reusing NCBO technology– to biomedicine and agronomy in the context of the NCBO, SIFR and AgroPortal projects

The evaluation of ontologies: quality, reuse and social factors

Finding a “good” or the “right” ontology is a growing challenge in the ontology domain, where one of the main aims is to share and reuse existing semantics and knowledge. Before reusing an ontology, knowledge engineers not only have to find a set of appropriate ontologies for their search query, but they should also be able to evaluate those ontologies according to different internal and external criteria. Therefore, ontology evaluation is at the heart of ontology selection and has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature.Despite the importance of ontology evaluation and selection and the widespread research on these topics, there are still many unanswered questions and challenges when it comes to evaluating and selecting ontologies for reuse. Most of the evaluation metrics and frameworks in the literature are mainly based on a limited set of internal characteristics, e.g., content and structure of ontologies and ignore how they are used and evaluated by communities. This thesis aimed to investigate the notion of quality and reusability in the ontology domain and to explore and identify the set of metrics that can affect the process of ontology evaluation and selection for reuse. [Continues.