Smith B, Brochhausen M
Institute of Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), Universität des Saarlandes, Campus A2.4, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany.
Methods Inf Med. 2010;49(2):135-40. doi: 10.3414/ME9302. Epub 2010 Feb 5.
Biomedical ontologies exist to serve integration of clinical and experimental data, and it is critical to their success that they be put to widespread use in the annotation of data. How, then, can ontologies achieve the sort of user-friendliness, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and breadth of coverage that is necessary to ensure extensive usage?
Our focus here is on two different sets of answers to these questions that have been proposed, on the one hand in medicine, by the SNOMED CT community, and on the other hand in biology, by the OBO Foundry. We address more specifically the issue as to how adherence to certain development principles can advance the usability and effectiveness of an ontology or terminology resource, for example by allowing more accurate maintenance, more reliable application, and more efficient interoperation with other ontologies and information resources.
SNOMED CT and the OBO Foundry differ considerably in their general approach. Nevertheless, a general trend towards more formal rigor and cross-domain interoperability can be seen in both and we argue that this trend should be accepted by all similar initiatives in the future.
Future efforts in ontology development have to address the need for harmonization and integration of ontologies across disciplinary borders, and for this, coherent formalization of ontologies is a pre-requisite.
生物医学本体的存在是为了服务于临床和实验数据的整合，而它们要在数据注释中得到广泛应用，这对其成功至关重要。那么，本体如何才能实现确保广泛使用所必需的那种用户友好性、可靠性、成本效益和覆盖范围呢？
我们在此关注针对这些问题提出的两组不同答案，一方面是医学领域的SNOMED CT社区给出的，另一方面是生物学领域的OBO铸造厂给出的。我们更具体地探讨了遵循某些开发原则如何能够提高本体或术语资源的可用性和有效性，例如通过实现更准确的维护、更可靠的应用以及与其他本体和信息资源更高效的互操作。
SNOMED CT和OBO铸造厂在总体方法上有很大差异。然而，在两者中都可以看到朝着更形式化的严谨性和跨领域互操作性发展的总体趋势，并且我们认为这一趋势在未来应该被所有类似的倡议所接受。
未来本体开发的努力必须满足跨学科边界的本体协调与整合需求，为此，本体的连贯形式化是一个先决条件。
