Building an allergens ontology and maintaining it using machine learning techniques

Ontologies are widely used for formalizing and organizing the knowledge of a particular domain of interest. This facilitates knowledge sharing and re-use by both people and systems. Ontologies are becoming increasingly important in the biomedical domain since they enable knowledge sharing in a formal, homogeneous and unambiguous way. Knowledge in a rapidly growing field such as biomedicine is usually evolving and therefore an ontology maintenance process is required to keep ontological knowledge up-to-date. This work presents our methodology for building a formally defined ontology, maintaining it exploiting machine learning techniques and domain specific corpora, and evaluating it using a well-defined experimental setting. The application of this methodology in the allergen domain is then discussed in detail presenting the ontology built, the specific techniques used and the evaluation settings.