title: A strategy for improving and integrating biomedical ontologies.
abstract: The integration of biomedical terminologies is indispensable to the process of information integration. When terminologies are linked merely through the alignment of their leaf terms, however, differences in context and ontological structure are ignored. Making use of the SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we show how three reference domain ontologies can be integrated at a higher level, through what we shall call the OBR framework (for: Ontology of Biomedical Reality). OBR is designed to facilitate inference across the boundaries of domain ontologies in anatomy, physiology and pathology.
authors.affiliation: Structural Informatics Group, Department of Biological Structure, University of Washington, USA.
authors.forename: Cornelius
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rosse
authors.forename: Anand
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kumar
authors.forename: Jose L V
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Mejino
authors.forename: Daniel L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Cook
authors.forename: Landon T
authors.initials: LT
authors.lastname: Detwiler
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D010336:Pathology / Q000145:classification; D010827:Physiology / Q000145:classification; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled