HCLS/OntologyTaskForce/OntologyCreation

Ontology Creation

We wish to foster collaborative approaches to developing ontologies with the involvement of subject matter experts, information architects and modelers and various application consumers (geneticists, clinicians).

 Comments?

The ontology created could be a by product of performing a daily task (e.g., reporting on results of gene tests) and should have an immediate value (e.g., reporting templates).
- For instance, in the life sciences domain, the processes of annotating data should be interleaved with the processes of creating the ontology.

  Comments?

In general, successful ontologies are created as part of a social process involving a community effort or interested experts; or a process in which schema is designed by humans but instances/population is carried by automated and semi-automated techniques, and by automated means through corpus analysis and subsequent curation. We may want to identify successful cases of each of these.

 Comments?

Distributed ontology development encourages participation of domain experts. The resulting ontologies more accurately reflect rich, well-contextualized knowledge, but this also increases the challenge of interoperability.

 Comments?

This group should identify strategies for ontology federation, including web-friendly mechanisms for cross-ontology mapping, inferencing in the face of incomplete consistency, and distributed or modular reasoning.

 Comments?

We should identify a set of building blocks and templates for ontology building that are specific to HCLS areas.

 Comments?