A common layer of interoperability for biomedical ontologies based on OWL EL

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Informatics
• Computational Biology
• Knowledge Representation

Background:

• Ontologies are crucial for semantic integration and knowledge discovery in biomedical research.
• Current ontologies face challenges in efficient reasoning, hindering data integration and interoperability.
• Less expressive ontology subsets can enable tractable reasoning for genuine interoperability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a framework for transforming OWL ontologies into the OWL EL subset.
• To enable efficient reasoning over biomedical ontologies.
• To facilitate data integration and interoperability in biomedical research.

Main Methods:

• The EL Vira framework converts OWL ontologies to the OWL EL subset.
• Evaluation of retained OWL constructs and inferences during conversion.
• Performance analysis demonstrating significant reduction in reasoning processing time.

Main Results:

• EL Vira successfully transforms OWL ontologies into the OWL EL subset, enabling tractable reasoning.
• The conversion process retains essential constructs while identifying lost inferences.
• Significant performance gains in reasoning time were observed.
• A repository of converted open biomedical ontologies is provided.

Conclusions:

• EL Vira establishes a common layer for ontological interoperability in the biomedical domain.
• This enables the development of software solutions for complex inferences and queries.
• Facilitates advanced scientific analyses through efficient biomedical ontology reasoning.