From GENIA to BioTop -- Towards a top-level ontology for biology

@inproceedings{citeulike:2599590, abstract = {The increasing need for ontological support in the life sciences is being generally acknowledged, but up until now, the development of biological upper level ontologies have mainly been purpose-driven. An example is the GENIA ontology, covering biological continuants, which has mainly been devised for corpus annotation in a text mining context. As an alternative, we here present BioTop, an upper ontology of physical continuants in the domain of biology, with a coverage similar to the GENIA ontology. We report on design specifications and modeling decisions based upon formal ontology principles. A major desideratum was to describe the classes in terms of both necessary and sufficient properties. This could be accomplished for 85 out of 146 classes. Conscious of the trade-off between expressivity and computational feasibility, we opted for constraining our description language to OWL-DL, with the advantage of using a terminological classifier for maintaining consistency, as a major heuristic support in the ontology building process.}, author = {Schulz, Stefan and Beisswanger, Elena and Hahn, Udo and Wermter, Joachim and Stenzhorn, Holger and Kumar, Anand }, citeulike-article-id = {2599590}, editor = {Fois-2006}, month = {November}, posted-at = {2008-03-26 19:25:50}, priority = {2}, title = {From GENIA to BioTop -- Towards a top-level ontology for biology}, url = {http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/brandon/FOIS-06/accepted/29.html}, year = {2006} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:2599590 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2599590 TI - From GENIA to BioTop -- Towards a top-level ontology for biology N2 - The increasing need for ontological support in the life sciences is being generally acknowledged, but up until now, the development of biological upper level ontologies have mainly been purpose-driven. An example is the GENIA ontology, covering biological continuants, which has mainly been devised for corpus annotation in a text mining context. As an alternative, we here present BioTop, an upper ontology of physical continuants in the domain of biology, with a coverage similar to the GENIA ontology. We report on design specifications and modeling decisions based upon formal ontology principles. A major desideratum was to describe the classes in terms of both necessary and sufficient properties. This could be accomplished for 85 out of 146 classes. Conscious of the trade-off between expressivity and computational feasibility, we opted for constraining our description language to OWL-DL, with the advantage of using a terminological classifier for maintaining consistency, as a major heuristic support in the ontology building process. AU - Schulz, Stefan AU - Beisswanger, Elena AU - Hahn, Udo AU - Wermter, Joachim AU - Stenzhorn, Holger AU - Kumar, Anand A2 - Fois-2006 PY - 2006/11/9-11/ UR - http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/brandon/FOIS-06/accepted/29.html ER -