title: How granularity issues concern biomedical ontology integration.
abstract: The application of upper ontologies has been repeatedly advocated for supporting interoperability between domain ontologies in order to facilitate shared data use both within and across disciplines. We have developed BioTop as a top-domain ontology to integrate more specialized ontologies in the biomolecular and biomedical domain. In this paper, we report on concrete integration problems of this ontology with the domain-independent Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) concerning the issue of fiat and aggregated objects in the context of different granularity levels. We conclude that the third BFO level must be ignored in order not to obviate cross-granularity integration.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Freiburg, Germany. stschulz@uni-freiburg.de
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Boeker
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Stenzhorn
mesh_terms: D030541:Databases, Genetic / Q000145:classification; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008491:Medical Informatics Applications; D008492:Medical Informatics Computing / Q000145:classification*; D011381:Programming Languages; D018511:Systems Integration; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled