Towards Context Driven Modularization of Large Biomedical Ontologies

Formal knowledge about human anatomy, radiology or diseases is necessary to support clinical applications such as medical image search. This machine processable knowledge can be acquired from biomedical domain ontologies, which however, are typically very large and complex models. Thus, their straightforward incorporation into the software applications becomes difficult. In this paper we discuss first ideas on a statistical approach for modularizing large medical ontologies and we prioritize the practical applicability aspect. The underlying assumption is that the application relevant ontology fragments, i.e. modules, can be identified by the statistical analysis of the ontology concepts in the domain corpus. Accordingly, we argue that most frequently occurring concepts in the domain corpus define the application context and can therefore potentially yield the relevant ontology modules. We illustrate our approach on an example case that involves a large ontology on human anatomy and report on our first manual experiments

Extending the Foundational Model of Anatomy with Automatically Acquired Spatial Relations

Formal ontologies have made significant impact in bioscience over the last ten years. Among them, the Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology (FMA) is the most comprehensive model for the spatio-structural representation of human anatomy. In the research project MEDICO we use the FMA as our main source of background knowledge about human anatomy. Our ultimate goals are to use spatial knowledge from the FMA (1) to improve automatic parsing algorithms for 3D volume data sets generated by Computed Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging and (2) to generate semantic annotations using the concepts from the FMA to allow semantic search on medical image repositories. We argue that in this context more spatial relation instances are needed than those currently available in the FMA. In this publication we present a technique for the automatic inductive acquisition of spatial relation instances by generalizing from expert-annotated volume datasets

A Linguistic Approach to Aligning Representations of Human Anatomy and Radiology

To realize applications such as semantic medical image search different domain ontologies are necessary that provide complementary knowledge about human anatomy and radiology. Consequently, integration of these different but nevertheless related types of medical knowledge from disparate domain ontologies becomes necessary. Ontology alignment is one way to achieve this objective. Our approach for aligning medical ontologies has three aspects: (a) linguistic-based, (b) corpus-based, and (c) dialogue-based. We briefly report on the linguistic alignment (i.e. the first aspect) using an ontology on human anatomy and a terminology on radiolog

A Linguistic Approach to Aligning Representations of Human Anatomy and Radiology

To realize applications such as semantic medical image search different domain ontologies are necessary that provide complementary knowledge about human anatomy and radiology. Consequently, integration of these different but nevertheless related types of medical knowledge from disparate domain ontologies becomes necessary. Ontology alignment is one way to achieve this objective. Our approach for aligning medical ontologies has three aspects: (a) linguistic-based, (b) corpus-based, and (c) dialogue-based. We briefly report on the linguistic alignment (i.e. the first aspect) using an ontology on human anatomy and a terminology on radiology

Analyzing Social Networks in Online News Articles

We discuss how Social Network Analysis can be applied to discover hidden relationships between people, organizations and places occurring in online news articles reporting on violent events. We introduce our model based approach and describe a knowledge base to demonstrate its applicationJRC.G.2-Support to external securit

Ontology Based Modelling and Visualisation of Social Networks for the Web

Abstract: Exploring and processing the relationships between social entitie (people and organizations) by mapping them to a mathematical graph model is been a rapidly growing research area known as Social Network Analysis (SNA). Majority of the models adapt statistical approaches to discover such social relationships in given resources. In this paper we introduce an initial work that takes a knowledge representation approach utilizing ontologies in order to map the social relationships between entities to logical models. This approach enables the deployment of inference mechanisms through the model by exploiting the logical structure to gain additional knowledge automatically from the resources at hand. Additionally, we use this structure and the information gained to visualize the social network that enables information seekers to have an explicit view of the entities and the relationships between them. As a demonstration this model and its visualization, we utilize the ontological model to explicate and visualize the relationships between the terror organization Al Qaeda and the people, who are connected to it, and events associated with it.JRC.G.2-Support to external securit

Learning to Populate an Ontology of Politically Motivated Violent Events

In this paper we present a working event extraction and classification infrastructure, which monitors news articles, detects and extracts structured descriptions of Politically Motivated Violent Events (PMVE) and feeds them into an ontological knowledge base. A knowledge base of about 2800 PMVE was built semi-automaticallyJRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Ontology modularization to improve semantic medical image annotation

AbstractSearching for medical images and patient reports is a significant challenge in a clinical setting. The contents of such documents are often not described in sufficient detail thus making it difficult to utilize the inherent wealth of information contained within them. Semantic image annotation addresses this problem by describing the contents of images and reports using medical ontologies. Medical images and patient reports are then linked to each other through common annotations. Subsequently, search algorithms can more effectively find related sets of documents on the basis of these semantic descriptions. A prerequisite to realizing such a semantic search engine is that the data contained within should have been previously annotated with concepts from medical ontologies. One major challenge in this regard is the size and complexity of medical ontologies as annotation sources. Manual annotation is particularly time consuming labor intensive in a clinical environment. In this article we propose an approach to reducing the size of clinical ontologies for more efficient manual image and text annotation. More precisely, our goal is to identify smaller fragments of a large anatomy ontology that are relevant for annotating medical images from patients suffering from lymphoma. Our work is in the area of ontology modularization, which is a recent and active field of research. We describe our approach, methods and data set in detail and we discuss our results