A collaborative workflow for building ontologies: A case study in the biomedical field

Much medical knowledge is contained within available literature, such as clinical guidelines and protocols. Recently, an interest has been developed in automatic content extraction to construct ontologies of this knowledge to make it more widely available. With groups of domain experts distributed geographically, and the growing amount of medical literature, an important challenge is to develop collaborative workflows to support ways for domain experts to contribute in the ontology learning process. This paper presents a collaborative workflow for ontology learning based on coupling an Ontology Learning Tool (OntoLancs) with and Ontology engineer (Protégé) to provide semi-automatic support for text mining and a collaborative tool to model formal ontologies. The work presented in this paper was evaluated with a case study on a Clinical Practice Guideline of Diabetic Retinopathy. The major benefits of coupling OntoLancs with Protégé are: a) a higher level of automation in the creation of domain ontologies and models, and b) strengthened communication and information exchange among domain experts that are physically distributed. Validations of user experiences indicate the applicability of our approach.