Description

Ontologies have become very popular in life sciences and other domains. They mostly undergo continuous changes and new ontology versions are frequently released. However, current analysis studies do not consider the ontology changes reflected in different versions but typically limit themselves to a specific ontology version which may quickly become obsolete. To allow applications easy access to different ontology versions we propose a central and uniform management of the versions of different biomedical ontologies. The proposed database approach takes concept and structural changes of succeeding ontology versions into account thereby supporting different kinds of change analysis. Furthermore, it is very space-efficient by avoiding redundant storage of ontology components which remain unchanged in different versions. We evaluate the storage requirements and query performance of the proposed approach for the Gene Ontology.

BibTex

@inproceedings{kirsten_ontocontent2009,
  author    = {Toralf Kirsten and
               Michael Hartung and
               Anika Gross and
               Erhard Rahm},
  title     = {Efficient Management of Biomedical Ontology Versions},
  booktitle = {OTM Workshops},
  year      = {2009},
  pages     = {574-583},
  ee        = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05290-3_71}
}