An ontology-based approach to improve data querying and organization of Alzheimer’s Disease data

Abstract

The recent advances in biotechnology and IT have led to an ever-increasing availability of public biomedical data distributed in large databases. Analyzing this huge volume of data is a challenging task because of its complexity, high heterogeneity and its multiple and numerous correlated factors. In the framework of neurodegenerative diseases, the last years have witnessed the creation of specialized databases such as the international projects ADNI (Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative). The main problems to fully exploit this database are related to the querying, integration, and analysis of data themselves. Here, we aim to develop a detailed ontology for clinical multidimensional datasets from ADNI repository in order to simplify the data access and to obtain new diagnostic knowledge about Alzheimer’s Disease.