Implicit knowledge discovery in biomedical ontologies: Computing interesting relatednesses

Abstract

Ontologies, seen as effective representations for sharing and reusing knowledge, have become increasingly important in biomedicine, usually focusing on taxonomic knowledge specific to a subject. Efforts have been made to uncover implicit knowledge within large biomedical ontologies by exploring semantic similarity and relatedness between concepts. However, much less attention has been paid to another potentially helpful approach: discovering implicit knowledge across multiple ontologies of different types, such as disease ontologies, symptom ontologies, and gene ontologies. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to the problem of ontology based implicit knowledge discovery - a Multi-Ontology Relatedness Model (MORM), which includes the formation of multiple related ontologies, a relatedness network and a formal inference mechanism based on set-theoretic operations. Experiments for biomedical applications have been carried out, and preliminary results show the potential value of the proposed approach for biomedical knowledge discovery.