Context-based refinement of mappings in evolving life science ontologies

Biomedical computational systems benefit from ontologies and their associated mappings. Indeed, aligned ontologies in life sciences play a central role in several semantic-enabled tasks, especially in data exchange. It is crucial to maintain up-to-date alignments according to new knowledge inserted in novel ontology releases. Refining ontology mappings in place, based on adding concepts, demands further research.

This article studies the mapping refinement phenomenon by proposing techniques to refine a set of established mappings based on the evolution of biomedical ontologies. In our first analysis, we investigate ways of suggesting correspondences with the new ontology version without applying a matching operation to the whole set of ontology entities. In the second analysis, the refinement technique enables deriving new mappings and updating the semantic type of the mapping beyond equivalence. Our study explores the neighborhood of concepts in the alignment process to refine mapping sets.

Experimental evaluations with several versions of aligned biomedical ontologies were conducted. Those experiments demonstrated the usefulness of ontology evolution changes to support the process of mapping refinement. Furthermore, using context in ontological concepts was effective in our techniques.