Méthodologie pour la réutilisation des ontologies biomédicales

Thanks to ontologies that capture the semantics of information and provide a concise declarative description, communication, information retrieval, knowledge sharing and decision making become more efficient. Medicine is among the fields which are interested in the modeling of knowledge in the form of ontologies. Two strategies for building ontologies can be envisaged: building ex nihilo and/or reusing existing resources such as UMLS. The reuse constitutes a central point of the engineering of the ontologies raising questions concerning the ambiguities, the inconsistencies and the heterogeneities. We are working on a pneumonia diagnostic domain ontology. To do this, we use a corpus of texts from good clinical practice guidelines (Cochrane and others) and we reuse other biomedical ontologies from OBO Foundry and Bioportal. This reuse can be complete, it is the case of the generic BFO and OGMS domain ontology. It can be partial like SYMP for symptoms, NCBITAXON for pathogens, SNOMED for types of pneumonia and RO for relationships between concepts. Our ontology which contains 743 classes, 29 relations and 1929 instances is submitted to an evaluation. The reuse of ontologies avoids confusions and inconsistencies that can be generated by several representations of the same domain.