Overcoming the Ontology Enrichment Bottleneck with Quick Term Templates

Abstract

AbstractThe developers of the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI) primarily use Protégé for editing. However, adding many classes with similar patterns of logical definition is time consuming, error prone, and requires the editor to have some expertise in OWL. Therefore, the process is poorly suited for a large number of domain experts who have limited experience Protégé and ontology development. We have developed a procedure to ease this task and allow such domain experts to add terms to the ontology in a way that both effectively includes complex logical definitions yet requires minimal manual intervention by OBI developers. The procedure is based on editing a Quick Term Template in a spreadsheet format which is subsequently converted into an OWL file. This procedure promises to be a robust and scalable approach for ontology enrichment.