Telomere Ontology: The Core Ontology for the Use Cases

Whereas each syntactic ontology is a direct representation of a data source in OWL-DL, an core ontology is a biologically-relevant, logically-rigorous ontology. A core ontology is not intended to capture all of biology; instead, it is scoped tightly to its purpose, which is modelling the research domain of interest. The core ontology used for these use cases is the telomere ontology, and Figure 7 shows a portion of this ontology. While the telomere ontology is not yet complete, the aspects of this ontology necessary for the use cases have been fully constructed.

Figure 7: The telomere ontology, the core ontology for the use cases.
Image tuo

Whereas syntactic ontology are designed to be syntactic representations of the underlying data sources and formats, an core ontology in the rule-based mediation methodology is an explicit description of the semantics of the research domain. Traditionally, mediator-based approaches for information integration have viewed the purpose of an core ontology as a union of syntactic ontologys rather than as a semantically-rich description of the research domain in its own right [18,19,10]. If a core ontology is defined as merely an ontology which models a set of data sources, the core ontology becomes brittle with respect to the addition of new data sources and new formats. By creating an core ontology which is more than the entailment of a set of syntactic ontologies, and which stands on its own as a semantically-rich model of a research domain, the core ontology becomes much more flexible with respect to changes.

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