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Efficient Management of Biomedical Ontology Versions
Toralf Kirsten1,2, Michael Hartung1, Anika Groß1, and Erhard Rahm1,3
1Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioinformatics, University of Leipzig
tkirsten@izbi.uni-leipzig.de
hartung@izbi.uni-leipzig.de
gross@izbi.uni-leipzig.de
rahm@informatik.uni-leipzig.de
2Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology, University of Leipzig
3Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Abstract. Ontologies have become very popular in life sciences and other domains. They mostly undergo continuous changes and new ontology versions are frequently released. However, current analysis studies do not consider the ontology changes reflected in different versions but typically limit themselves to a specific ontology version which may quickly become obsolete. To allow applications easy access to different ontology versions we propose a central and uniform management of the versions of different biomedical ontologies. The proposed database approach takes concept and structural changes of succeeding ontology versions into account thereby supporting different kinds of change analysis. Furthermore, it is very space-efficient by avoiding redundant storage of ontology components which remain unchanged in different versions. We evaluate the storage requirements and query performance of the proposed approach for the Gene Ontology.
Keywords: Ontology versioning, integration, management
LNCS 5872, p. 574 ff.
lncs@springer.com
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009