Noy Natalya F, de Coronado Sherri, Solbrig Harold, Fragoso Gilberto, Hartel Frank W, Musen Mark A
Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States,
Appl Ontol. 2008 Jan 1;3(3):173-190. doi: 10.3233/AO-2008-0051.
The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Thesaurus is a biomedical reference ontology. The NCI Thesaurus is represented using Description Logic, more specifically Ontylog, a Description logic implemented by Apelon, Inc. We are exploring the use of the DL species of the Web Ontology Language (OWL DL)-a W3C recommended standard for ontology representation-instead of Ontylog for representing the NCI Thesaurus. We have studied the requirements for knowledge representation of the NCI Thesaurus, and considered how OWL DL (and its implementation in Protégé-OWL) satisfies these requirements. In this paper, we discuss the areas where OWL DL was sufficient for representing required components, where tool support that would hide some of the complexity and extra levels of indirection would be required, and where language expressiveness is not sufficient given the representation requirements. Because many of the knowledge-representation issues that we encountered are very similar to the issues in representing other biomedical terminologies and ontologies in general, we believe that the lessons that we learned and the approaches that we developed will prove useful and informative for other researchers.
美国国家癌症研究所（NCI）叙词表是一种生物医学参考本体。NCI叙词表使用描述逻辑来表示，更具体地说是Ontylog，它是由Apelon公司实现的一种描述逻辑。我们正在探索使用网络本体语言（OWL DL）的DL种类——一种W3C推荐的本体表示标准——来代替Ontylog表示NCI叙词表。我们研究了NCI叙词表知识表示的要求，并考虑了OWL DL（及其在Protégé-OWL中的实现）如何满足这些要求。在本文中，我们讨论了OWL DL足以表示所需组件的领域、需要隐藏一些复杂性和额外间接层次的工具支持的领域，以及鉴于表示要求语言表达能力不足的领域。由于我们遇到的许多知识表示问题与一般表示其他生物医学术语和本体时遇到的问题非常相似，我们相信我们学到的经验教训和开发的方法将被证明对其他研究人员有用且信息丰富。
