Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
378175 Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2007 13 Pages PDF
Abstract

SummaryObjectiveFormalisms based on one or other flavor of description logic (DL) are sometimes put forward as helping to ensure that terminologies and controlled vocabularies comply with sound ontological principles. The objective of this paper is to study the degree to which one DL-based biomedical terminology (SNOMED CT) does indeed comply with such principles.Materials and methodsWe defined seven ontological principles (for example: each class must have at least one parent, each class must differ from its parent) and examined the properties of SNOMED CT classes with respect to these principles.ResultsOur major results are 31% of these classes have a single child; 27% have multiple parents; 51% do not exhibit any differentiae between the description of the parent and that of the child.ConclusionsThe applications of this principles to quality assurance for ontologies are discussed and suggestions are made for dealing with the phenomenon of multiple inheritance. The advantages and limitations of our approach are also discussed.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Artificial Intelligence
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