Ontology and Ontology Based Systems

Ontology
● Ontology can be defined as the formal hierarchical arrangement of the
concepts in a specific knowledge domain.
● It depicts the properties and relationships between the concepts of
that domain. It commonly has classes, attributes, relationships, events
and instances.
● There are some very large and rich Ontologies
● Dynamic Ontologies change over time such as Dbpedia ontology
● Static Ontologies do not change over time such as GeneOntology,
WordNet and Mesh.
● Ontologies can be in different languages or may contain different
language incorporated into one depending upon requirement and use.

Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar

Chunk of an Ontology

Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar

 DBPedia Ontology
● Dbpedia is structured representation of Wikipedia
● Stores the same information as the Wikipedia but in
a structured manner so it can be manipulated and
explored in better and easier way.
● For each resource/page in Wikipedia, there exists a
parallel piece of information called “thing” in Dbpedia.
● It is the conversion of free text of Wikipedia into a
structured information repository so that semantic of the
articles can be dealt with.

Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar

Example

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Example

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Example

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 WordNet
● WordNet is another ontology representing thousands of
concepts in English.
● Developed by Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton
University (Suchanek et al.).
● All the concepts are divided into synonyms’ sets called synsets
and categorized as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
● Network of semantically related words and concepts is created
by interlinking the synsets on the basis of semantic and relationship.
● The main building blocks in WordNet are the synsets e.g.
{descend, fall, go down, come down} is an example of a synset.
● Main hierarchy of the ontology is based on hyponym relation
between synsets which is similar to the subclass relation.

Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar

 Disease Ontology*
● Disease Ontology (DO) represents a comprehensive
knowledge base of 8043 human diseases (Schriml et
al., 2012)
● Standardized ontology for human disease

● Consistent, reusable and sustainable descriptions of

human disease terms

● Related medical vocabulary disease concepts

● Cross mapping of DO terms to SNOMED, MeSh etc

* http://www.disease-ontology.org/ Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar

Disease Ontology Visualization

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Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar
Linking with Knowledge Resources

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 Applications
● Suggest Applications of Disease Ontology?

Dr. Maheen Bakhtyar