Competency questions for biomedical ontology reuse

Reusing ontologies has been recognized as a good practice that most ontology building methodologies encourage. Indeed, reuse supports the semantic interoperability among different datasets and applications, increases accuracy, and reduces engineering costs and efforts. Nevertheless, many problems arise during the process since the latter is far from being automated, and instead requires significant commitment from the knowledge engineer. Inconsistencies have to be resolved when the same concepts are differently represented in different ontologies or some parts reused have to be altered. In this paper, we present a new approach to resolve theses inconsistencies. We use competency questions to capture the scope and content of each concept that is represented differently in several ontologies. The proposed approach is applied to the pneumonia domain, specifically to the pneumonia diagnosis. We reused 9 ontologies and we resolved 47 inconsistencies.