What makes a good concept anyway ?

Abstract

A good medical ontology is expected to cover its domain completely and correctly. On the other hand, large ontologies are hard to build, hard to understand, and hard to maintain. Thus, adding new concepts (often multi-word concepts) to an existing ontology must be done judiciously. Only "good" concepts should be added; however, it is difficult to define what makes a concept good. In this research, we propose a metric to measure the goodness of a concept. We identified factors that appear to influence goodness judgments of medical experts and combined them into a single metric. These factors include concept name length (in words), concept occurrence frequency in the medical literature, and syntactic categories of component words. As an added factor, we used the simplicity of a term after mapping it into a specific foreign language. We performed Bayesian optimization of factor weights to achieve maximum agreement between the metric and three medical experts. The results showed that our metric had a 50.67% overall agreement with the experts, as measured by Krippendorff's alpha.