Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2008 Nov 6:2008:500-4.

Auditing the NCI thesaurus with semantic web technologies

Fleur Mougin  1 , Olivier Bodenreider
Affiliations

Auditing the NCI thesaurus with semantic web technologies

Fleur Mougin et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. .

Abstract

Auditing biomedical terminologies often results in the identification of inconsistencies and thus helps to improve their quality. In this paper, we present a method based on Semantic Web technologies for auditing biomedical terminologies and apply it to the NCI thesaurus. We stored the NCI thesaurus concepts and their properties in an RDF triple store. By querying this store, we assessed the consistency of both hierarchical and associative relations from the NCI thesaurus among themselves and with corresponding relations in the UMLS Semantic Network. We show that the consistency is better for associative relations than for hierarchical relations. Causes for inconsistency and benefits from using Semantic Web technologies for auditing purposes are discussed.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Auditing hierarchical relationships a) at the semantic type level; b) at the semantic group level.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Auditing associative relationships.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Triples obtained for the concept C9499.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. McCray AT, Bodenreider O. A conceptual framework for the biomedical domain. In: Green R, Bean CA, Myaeng SH, editors. The semantics of relationships: an interdisciplinary perspective. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers; 2002. pp. 181–98.
    1. Cimino JJ, Min H, Perl Y. Consistency across the hierarchies of the UMLS Semantic Network and Metathesaurus. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2003;36(6):450–61. - PubMed
    1. Ceusters W, Smith B, Goldberg L. A terminological and ontological analysis of the NCI Thesaurus. Methods Inf Med. 2005;44(4):498–507. - PubMed
    1. Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila O. The Semantic Web. Scientific Am. 2001 May;:34–43.
    1. Nardon FB, Moura LA. Knowledge sharing and information integration in healthcare using ontologies and deductive databases. Medinfo. 2004;11:62–6. - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources