Engineering Trustworthy Ontologies: Case Study of Protein Ontology

Abstract

Biomedical ontologies are huge. It is not possible for any one person to manage and engineer a complete ontology. They would need the help of research assistants and other people to develop and maintain the ontology. In the process of developing and maintaining the ontology the research assistants may enter incorrect data, resulting in low quality of the ontology. In this paper we will propose a conceptual framework to solve these ontology management and ontology development issues. There can be N assistants entering data into the ontology. All the data entered initially is stored in an intermediate ontology. The administrator of the ontology has a set of rules, which makes a checklist that checks and validates the data in intermediate ontology for correctness according to the ontology schema. We use the case study of protein ontology for this proposed approach to develop interfaces for assistants and administrators. The proposed approach can easily be extended to other biomedical ontologies just by tweaking the administrator rule set according to the ontology