Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, United States.
J Biomed Inform. 2013 Feb;46(1):128-38. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2012.09.003. Epub 2012 Sep 28.
Terminologies and ontologies are increasingly prevalent in healthcare and biomedicine. However they suffer from inconsistent renderings, distribution formats, and syntax that make applications through common terminologies services challenging. To address the problem, one could posit a shared representation syntax, associated schema, and tags. We identified a set of commonly-used elements in biomedical ontologies and terminologies based on our experience with the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Specification as well as the Lexical Grid (LexGrid) project. We propose guidelines for precisely such a shared terminology model, and recommend tags assembled from SKOS, OWL, Dublin Core, RDF Schema, and DCMI meta-terms. We divide these guidelines into lexical information (e.g. synonyms, and definitions) and semantic information (e.g. hierarchies). The latter we distinguish for use by informal terminologies vs. formal ontologies. We then evaluate the guidelines with a spectrum of widely used terminologies and ontologies to examine how the lexical guidelines are implemented, and whether our proposed guidelines would enhance interoperability.
术语和本体在医疗保健和生物医学领域越来越流行。然而，它们存在不一致的表示、分布格式和语法，这使得通过通用术语服务进行应用具有挑战性。为了解决这个问题，可以假设一个共享的表示语法、相关的模式和标签。我们根据在 Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Specification 以及 Lexical Grid (LexGrid) 项目中的经验，确定了一组在生物医学本体论和术语中常用的元素。我们为这种共享术语模型提出了指导方针，并建议从 SKOS、OWL、Dublin Core、RDF Schema 和 DCMI 元术语中组装标签。我们将这些指导方针分为词汇信息（例如同义词和定义）和语义信息（例如层次结构）。我们将后者区分开来，供非正式术语和正式本体使用。然后，我们使用广泛使用的术语和本体对这些指导方针进行评估，以检查词汇指导方针是如何实现的，以及我们提出的指导方针是否会增强互操作性。
