Drivers for the development of an Animal Health Surveillance Ontology (AHSO)

Comprehensive reviews of syndromic surveillance in animal health have highlighted the hindrances to integration and interoperability among systems when data emerge from different sources. Discussions with syndromic surveillance experts in the fields of animal and public health, as well as computer scientists from the field of information management, have led to the conclusion that a major component of any solution will involve the adoption of ontologies. Here we describe the advantages of such an approach, and the steps taken to set up the Animal Health Surveillance Ontological (AHSO) framework. The AHSO framework is modelled in OWL, the W3C standard Semantic Web language for representing rich and complex knowledge. We illustrate how the framework can incorporate knowledge directly from domain experts or from data-driven sources, as well as by integrating existing mature ontological components from related disciplines. The development and extent of AHSO will be community driven and the final products in the framework will be open-access.

Experiences from the anatomy track in the ontology alignment evaluation initiative

BACKGROUND

One of the longest running tracks in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative is the Anatomy track which focuses on aligning two anatomy ontologies. The Anatomy track was started in 2005. In 2005 and 2006 the task in this track was to align the Foundational Model of Anatomy and the OpenGalen Anatomy Model. Since 2007 the ontologies used in the track are the Adult Mouse Anatomy and a part of the NCI Thesaurus. Since 2015 the data in the Anatomy track is also used in the Interactive track of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative.

RESULTS

In this paper we focus on the Anatomy track in the years 2007-2016 and the Anatomy part of the Interactive track in 2015-2016. We describe the data set and the changes it went through during the years as well as the challenges it poses for ontology alignment systems. Further, we give an overview of all systems that participated in the track and the techniques they have used. We discuss the performance results of the systems and summarize the general trends.

CONCLUSIONS

About 50 systems have participated in the Anatomy track. Many different techniques were used. The most popular matching techniques are string-based strategies and structure-based techniques. Many systems also use auxiliary information. The quality of the alignment has increased for the best performing systems since the beginning of the track and more and more systems check the coherence of the proposed alignment and implement a repair strategy. Further, interacting with an oracle is beneficial.

Querying Archetype-Based Electronic Health Records Using Hadoop and Dewey Encoding of openEHR Models

Archetype-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems using generic reference models from e.g. openEHR, ISO 13606 or CIMI should be easy to update and reconfigure with new types (or versions) of data models or entries, ideally with very limited programming or manual database tweaking. Exploratory research (e.g. epidemiology) leading to ad-hoc querying on a population-wide scale can be a challenge in such environments. This publication describes implementation and test of an archetype-aware Dewey encoding optimization that can be used to produce such systems in environments supporting relational operations, e.g. RDBMs and distributed map-reduce frameworks like Hadoop. Initial testing was done using a nine-node 2.2 GHz quad-core Hadoop cluster querying a dataset consisting of targeted extracts from 4+ million real patient EHRs, query results with sub-minute response time were obtained.

Completing the is-a structure in light-weight ontologies

Background

With the increasing presence of biomedical data sources on the Internet more and more research effort is put into finding possible ways for integrating and searching such often heterogeneous sources. Ontologies are a key technology in this effort. However, developing ontologies is not an easy task and often the resulting ontologies are not complete. In addition to being problematic for the correct modelling of a domain, such incomplete ontologies, when used in semantically-enabled applications, can lead to valid conclusions being missed.

Results

We consider the problem of repairing missing is-a relations in ontologies. We formalize the problem as a generalized TBox abduction problem. Based on this abduction framework, we present complexity results for the existence, relevance and necessity decision problems for the generalized TBox abduction problem with and without some specific preference relations for ontologies that can be represented using a member of the \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} ${\mathcal {EL}}$ \end{document}Eℒ family of description logics. Further, we present algorithms for finding solutions, a system as well as experiments.

Conclusions

Semantically-enabled applications need high quality ontologies and one key aspect is their completeness. We have introduced a framework and system that provides an environment for supporting domain experts to complete the is-a structure of ontologies. We have shown the usefulness of the approach in different experiments. For the two Anatomy ontologies from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, we repaired 94 and 58 initial given missing is-a relations, respectively, and detected and repaired additionally, 47 and 10 missing is-a relations. In an experiment with BioTop without given missing is-a relations, we detected and repaired 40 new missing is-a relations.

A unified approach for debugging is-a structure and mappings in networked taxonomies

Background

With the increased use of ontologies and ontology mappings in semantically-enabled applications such as ontology-based search and data integration, the issue of detecting and repairing defects in ontologies and ontology mappings has become increasingly important. These defects can lead to wrong or incomplete results for the applications.

Results

We propose a unified framework for debugging the is-a structure of and mappings between taxonomies, the most used kind of ontologies. We present theory and algorithms as well as an implemented system RepOSE, that supports a domain expert in detecting and repairing missing and wrong is-a relations and mappings. We also discuss two experiments performed by domain experts: an experiment on the Anatomy ontologies from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, and a debugging session for the Swedish National Food Agency.

Conclusions

Semantically-enabled applications need high quality ontologies and ontology mappings. One key aspect is the detection and removal of defects in the ontologies and ontology mappings. Our system RepOSE provides an environment that supports domain experts to deal with this issue. We have shown the usefulness of the approach in two experiments by detecting and repairing circa 200 and 30 defects, respectively.

Workshop on laboratory protocol standards for the Molecular Methods Database

Management of data to produce scientific knowledge is a key challenge for biological research in the 21st century. Emerging high-throughput technologies allow life science researchers to produce big data at speeds and in amounts that were unthinkable just a few years ago. This places high demands on all aspects of the workflow: from data capture (including the experimental constraints of the experiment), analysis and preservation, to peer-reviewed publication of results. Failure to recognise the issues at each level can lead to serious conflicts and mistakes; research may then be compromised as a result of the publication of non-coherent protocols, or the misinterpretation of published data. In this report, we present the results from a workshop that was organised to create an ontological data-modelling framework for Laboratory Protocol Standards for the Molecular Methods Database (MolMeth). The workshop provided a set of short- and long-term goals for the MolMeth database, the most important being the decision to use the established EXACT description of biomedical ontologies as a starting point.

A Tool for Evaluating Strategies for Grouping of Biological Data

During the last decade an enormous amount of biological data has been generated and techniques and tools to analyze this data have been developed. Many of these tools use some form of grouping and are used in, for instance, data integration, data cleaning, prediction of protein functionality, and correlation of genes based on microarray data. A number of aspects influence the quality of the grouping results: the data sources, the grouping attributes and the algorithms implementing the grouping procedure. Many methods exist, but it is often not clear which methods perform best for which grouping tasks. The study of the properties, and the evaluation and the comparison of the different aspects that influence the quality of the grouping results, would give us valuable insight in how the grouping procedures could be used in the best way. It would also lead to recommendations on how to improve the current procedures and develop new procedures. To be able to perform such studies and evaluations we need environments that allow us to compare and evaluate different grouping strategies. In this paper we present a framework, KitEGA1, for such an environment, and present its current prototype implementation. We illustrate its use by comparing grouping strategies for classifying proteins regarding biological function and isozymes.

A review of standards for data exchange within systems biology

The rapid increase in experimental data within systems biology has increased the need for exchange of data to allow analysis and comparison of larger datasets. This has resulted in a need for standardized formats for representation of such results and currently many formats for representation of data have been developed or are under development. In this paper, we give an overview of the current state of available standards and ontologies within systems biology. We focus on XML-based standards for exchange of data and give a thorough description of similarities and differences of currently available formats. For each of these, we discuss how the important concepts such as substances, interactions, and experimental data can be represented. In particular, we note that the purpose of a standard is often visible in the structures it provides for the representation of data. A clear purpose is also crucial for the success of a standard. Moreover, we note that the development of representation formats is parallel to the development of ontologies and the recent trend is that representation formats make more and more use of available ontologies.

Representing, storing and accessing molecular interaction data: a review of models and tools

One important aim within systems biology is to integrate disparate pieces of information, leading to discovery of higher-level knowledge about important functionality within living organisms. This makes standards for representation of data and technology for exchange and integration of data important key points for development within the area. In this article, we focus on the recent developments within the field. We compare the recent updates to the three standard representations for exchange of data SBML, PSI MI and BioPAX. In addition, we give an overview of available tools for these three standards and a discussion on how these developments support possibilities for data exchange and integration.

Representations of molecular pathways: an evaluation of SBML, PSI MI and BioPAX

MOTIVATION

Analysis and simulation of pathway data is of high importance in bioinformatics. Standards for representation of information about pathways are necessary for integration and analysis of data from various sources. Recently, a number of representation formats for pathway data, SBML, PSI MI and BioPAX, have been proposed.

RESULTS

In this paper we compare these formats and evaluate them with respect to their underlying models, information content and possibilities for easy creation of tools. The evaluation shows that the main structure of the formats is similar. However, SBML is tuned towards simulation models of molecular pathways while PSI MI is more suitable for representing details about particular interactions and experiments. BioPAX is the most general and expressive of the formats. These differences are apparent in allowed information and the structure for representation of interactions. We discuss the impact of these differences both with respect to information content in existing databases and computational properties for import and analysis of data.

Evaluation of ontology merging tools in bioinformatics

Ontologies are being used nowadays in many areas, including bioinformatics. One of the issues in ontology research is the aligning and merging of ontologies. Tools have been developed for ontology merging, but they have not been evaluated for their use in bioinformatics. In this paper we evaluate two of the most well-known ontology merging tools with a bioinformatics perspective. As test ontologies we have used Gene Ontology and Signal-Ontology.

Evaluation of ontology development tools for bioinformatics

Ontologies are being used nowadays in many areas, including bioinformatics. To assist users in developing and maintaining ontologies a number of tools have been developed. In this paper we compare four such tools, Protégé-2000, Chimaera, DAG-Edit and OilEd. As test ontologies we have used ontologies from the Gene Ontology Consortium. No system is preferred in all situations, but each system has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Computer science as an integrated part of engineering education

The Information Technology curriculum at Linköping University has as goal to form engineers with an integrated view of engineering. The teaching philosophy in this curriculum is Problem-Based Learning. The education in each term is organised in a number of themes where topics from different disciplines are integrated. We describe a particular term in the Information Technology curriculum as an example of the approach and the integration of computer science teaching with the teaching of other disciplines. An important advantage of the approach is that the students discover interactions between different disciplines and view the different topics as naturally connected. Also, the students seem to have a better understanding of the topics and are better motivated. Further, they obtain improved communication and co-operation skills. Another advantage is that the approach is appreciated by our female students, which has led to a higher percentage of female students in this curriculum compared to our other computer science curricula.