Summary
Objectives: Biomedical ontologies exist to serve integration of clinical and experimental data,
and it is critical to their success that they be put to widespread use in the annotation
of data. How, then, can ontologies achieve the sort of user-friendliness, reliability,
cost-effectiveness, and breadth of coverage that is necessary to ensure extensive
usage?
Methods: Our focus here is on two different sets of answers to these questions that have been
proposed, on the one hand in medicine, by the SNOMED CT community, and on the other
hand in biology, by the OBO Foundry. We address more specifically the issue as to
how adherence to certain development principles can advance the usability and effectiveness
of an ontology or terminology resource, for example by allowing more accurate maintenance,
more reliable application, and more efficient interoperation with other ontologies
and information resources.
Results: SNOMED CT and the OBO Foundry differ considerably in their general approach. Nevertheless,
a general trend towards more formal rigor and cross-domain interoperability can be
seen in both and we argue that this trend should be accepted by all similar initiatives
in the future.
Conclusions: Future efforts in ontology development have to address the need for harmonization
and integration of ontologies across disciplinary borders, and for this, coherent
formalization of ontologies is a prerequisite.
Keywords
Biomedical ontologies - ontology harmonization - quality assurance - SNOMED CT
