title: A family-based framework for supporting quality assurance of biomedical ontologies in BioPortal.
abstract: BioPortal contains over 300 ontologies, for which quality assurance (QA) is critical. Abstraction networks (ANs), compact summarizations of ontology structure and content, have been used in such QA efforts, typically in a "one-off" manner for a single ontology. Ontologies can be characterized-independently of knowledge-content focus-from a structural standpoint leading to the formulation of ontology families. A family is defined as a set of ontologies satisfying some overarching condition regarding their structural features. Seven such families, comprising 186 ontologies, are identified. To increase efficiency, a new family-based QA framework is introduced in which an automated, uniform AN derivation technique and accompanying semi-automated, uniform QA regimen are applicable to the ontologies of a given family. Specifically, across an entire family, the QA efforts exploit family-wide AN features in the characterization of sets of classes that are more likely to harbor errors. The approach is demonstrated on the Cancer Chemoprevention BioPortal ontology.
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ;
authors.forename: Zhe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ;
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ochs
authors.affiliation: Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY;
authors.forename: Ankur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Agrawal
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ;
authors.forename: Yehoshua
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Perl
authors.affiliation: University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece;
authors.forename: Dimitris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zeginis
authors.affiliation: University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece;
authors.forename: Konstantinos
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tarabanis
authors.affiliation: Halfpenny Technologies, Blue Bell, PA;
authors.forename: Gai
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Elhanan
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ;
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Halper
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
authors.forename: Natasha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Noy
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ;
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Geller
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D064229:Biological Ontologies; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000517:prevention & control; D011381:Programming Languages; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care
chemical_list: D000970:Antineoplastic Agents