The CEN ISO Standard Categorial Structure as a Top-Level Set of Constraints for Ontology Disambiguation

Since 1990 CEN TC 251 and ISO TC 215 have developed an approach named Categorial Structure. It is a logic-based language that aims at standardising the upper level structure of a terminological model rather than agreeing on a reference clinical terminology or on a language-independent biomedical ontology. Since 2000 methods, tools and techniques based on upper level ontology and description logic formalism have been developed in the Semantic Web and the bio-ontology communities. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relation between the two approaches in order to promote the complementary use of ontology and structured information model tools in the harmonisation between biomedical terminologies and to improve semantic interoperability.