Quality assurance and enrichment of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies.

Journal: BMC medical informatics and decision making
Published Date:

Abstract

Biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies are used to organize and store various domain-specific knowledge to provide standardization of terminology usage and to improve interoperability. The growing number of such ontologies and terminologies and their increasing adoption in clinical, research and healthcare settings call for effective and efficient quality assurance and semantic enrichment techniques of these ontologies and terminologies. In this editorial, we provide an introductory summary of nine articles included in this supplement issue for quality assurance and enrichment of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies. The articles cover a range of standards including SNOMED CT, National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, Unified Medical Language System, North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and OBO Foundry Ontologies.

Authors

  • Ankur Agrawal
    Department of Computer Science, Manhattan College, NY, USA. Electronic address: ankur@manhattan.edu.
  • Licong Cui
    The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, USA.