Ontology Reuse: the Real Test of Ontological Design

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes that practical ontology reuse is essential for verifying and enhancing ontology quality, especially in complex biomedical and computer science domains, despite advances in automated quality assurance tools.

Contribution

It introduces diverse methods for detecting issues in ontology reuse and advocates for reuse as the key to ongoing quality improvement and development.

Findings

Analysis of 30 biomedical ontologies and the Computer Science Ontology.

Identification of issues through natural language processing and network analysis.

Reusing ontologies helps find and fix problems, guiding future development.

Abstract

Reusing ontologies in practice is still very challenging, especially when multiple ontologies are (jointly) involved. Moreover, despite recent advances, the realization of systematic ontology quality assurance remains a difficult problem. In this work, the quality of thirty biomedical ontologies, and the Computer Science Ontology are investigated, from the perspective of a practical use case. Special scrutiny is given to cross-ontology references, which are vital for combining ontologies. Diverse methods to detect potential issues are proposed, including natural language processing and network analysis. Moreover, several suggestions for improving ontologies and their quality assurance processes are presented. It is argued that while the advancing automatic tools for ontology quality assurance are crucial for ontology improvement, they will not solve the problem entirely. It is ontology reuse that is the ultimate method for continuously verifying and improving ontology quality, as well as for guiding its future development. Specifically, multiple issues can be found and fixed primarily through practical and diverse ontology reuse scenarios.