title: Experience in reasoning with the foundational model of anatomy in OWL DL.
abstract: The objective of this study is to compare description logics (DLs) and frames for representing large-scale biomedical ontologies and reasoning with them. The ontology under investigation is the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). We converted it from its frame-based representation in Protégé into OWL DL. The OWL reasoner Racer helped identify unsatisfiable classes in the FMA. Support for consistency checking is clearly an advantage of using DLs rather than frames. The interest of reclassification was limited, due to the difficulty of defining necessary and sufficient conditions for anatomical entities. The sheer size and complexity of the FMA was also an issue.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Mathematics, Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. smzhang@math.ac.cn
authors.forename: Songmao
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bodenreider
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Golbreich
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D020407:Internet; D008128:Logic; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D012660:Semantics