Seminar: Working with big biomedical ontologies

Axioms in the Web Ontology Language can be hard to understand; large ontologies that use complex patterns of axioms are even harder to author and understand. In this talk, I will describe work we have done in the area of understanding and building ontologies that begins to address these issues. Included in the talk will be: – Generating natural language from ontologies; – Detecting regularities and irregularities in ontologies; – Scripting-pattern-based addition of axioms to ontologies; – Spreadsheet based approaches to populating ontologies. I will illustrate the talk with examples taken from various biomedical ontologies and their applications in which we have been involved and draw some conclusions about what we are doing. Robert Stevens Bio-Health Informatics Group, School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester Oxford Road, Manchester, United Kingdom, M13 9PL robert.Stevens@Manchester.ac.uk