Terminology representation guidelines for biomedical ontologies in the semantic web notations

Terminologies and ontologies are increasingly prevalent in healthcare and biomedicine. However they suffer from inconsistent renderings, distribution formats, and syntax that make applications through common terminologies services challenging. To address the problem, one could posit a shared representation syntax, associated schema, and tags. We identified a set of commonly-used elements in biomedical ontologies and terminologies based on our experience with the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Specification as well as the Lexical Grid (LexGrid) project. We propose guidelines for precisely such a shared terminology model, and recommend tags assembled from SKOS, OWL, Dublin Core, RDF Schema, and DCMI meta-terms. We divide these guidelines into lexical information (e.g. synonyms, and definitions) and semantic information (e.g. hierarchies). The latter we distinguish for use by informal terminologies vs. formal ontologies. We then evaluate the guidelines with a spectrum of widely used terminologies and ontologies to examine how the lexical guidelines are implemented, and whether our proposed guidelines would enhance interoperability.

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► We propose terminology guidelines for representing biomedical ontologies in W3C notations.
► The guidelines have been evaluated using popular biomedical ontologies.
► These guidelines provide a unified representation for common elements in the biomedical domain.
► They will synergistically tighten the Semantic Web and biomedical domain knowledge.
► Semantic interoperability can be achieved by bringing a semantic harmonization over biomedical ontologies and terminologies.