How do Ontology Mappings Change in the Life Sciences?

Mappings between related ontologies are increasingly used to support data integration and analysis tasks. Changes in the ontologies also require the adaptation of ontology mappings. So far the evolution of ontology mappings has received little attention albeit ontologies change continuously especially in the life sciences. We therefore analyze how mappings between popular life science ontologies evolve for different match algorithms. We also evaluate which semantic ontology changes primarily affect the mappings. We further investigate alternatives to predict or estimate the degree of future mapping changes based on previous ontology and mapping transitions.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2731

Ontologies have become increasingly important in the life sciences [4, 18]. They are used to semantically annotate molecular-biological objects such as proteins or pathways [27]. Different ontologies of the same domain often contain over- lapping and related information. For instance, information about mammalian anatomy can be found in NCI Thesaurus [19] and Adult Mouse Anatomy [1]. Ontology mappings are used to express the semantic relationships between dif- ferent but related ontologies, e.g., by linking equivalent concepts of two ontolo- gies. Mappings between related ontologies are useful in many ways, in particular for data integration and enhanced analysis [21, 15]. In particular, such map- pings are needed to merge ontologies, e.g., to create an integrated cross-species anatomy ontology such as the Uber ontology [29]. Anatomy ontology mappings may also be useful to transfer knowledge from different experiments between species [3]. Furthermore, mappings can help finding objects with similar on- tological properties as interesting targets for a comparative analysis. Ontology curators can further find missing ontology annotations and get recommendations for possible ontology enhancements based on mappings to other ontologies.