How do Ontology Mappings Change in the Life Sciences?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how ontology mappings in the life sciences evolve over time, analyzing the impact of ontology changes on mappings and exploring methods to predict future mapping modifications.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of ontology mappings and evaluates the influence of semantic ontology changes, introducing approaches to predict future mapping changes.

Findings

Ontology mappings change significantly over time.

Semantic ontology changes are primary drivers of mapping evolution.

Proposed methods can estimate future mapping modifications.

Abstract

Mappings between related ontologies are increasingly used to support data integration and analysis tasks. Changes in the ontologies also require the adaptation of ontology mappings. So far the evolution of ontology mappings has received little attention albeit ontologies change continuously especially in the life sciences. We therefore analyze how mappings between popular life science ontologies evolve for different match algorithms. We also evaluate which semantic ontology changes primarily affect the mappings. We further investigate alternatives to predict or estimate the degree of future mapping changes based on previous ontology and mapping transitions.