Semi-Automated Construction of an Ontology for Amphibian Morphology

The integration of information across remote systems is becoming more and more important. It allows users to find answers from multiple sources with fewer operations, e.g., finding the best air fare to a given location for a specific date. This is the core exchange problem addressed by the Semantic Web. Because they can be used either by software agents or by humans, these technologies commonly exploit ontologies as the vehicle for information exchange. Currently, the use of ontologies requires large amounts of manual effort. We believe that the Semantic Web will be more widely available once we are able to handle ontologies more easily. In this project, we propose to construct a system that reduces the amount of human effort required by semi-automatically creating an ontology. We will demonstrate this approach in the domain of vertebrate morphology. If successful, this approach could be applied to other domains, increasing the adoption of concept based applications. This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation award NSF DBI 0445752.

Overall Project Plan

1. Manually constructing an ontology for a small subset of the amphibian anatomy with input from the research community.
2. Developing software to automate the mining of electronic media to produce an ontology.
3. Benchmarking the resulting automated ontology against the manually developed ontology.
4. Repeating the benchmarking of automated and manually developed ontologies for a different organism and a different anatomical system.
5. Using the automated software to develop an ontology for all systems of all amphibian orders.
6. Creating a web-accessible user interface to OntAnat and
7. Demonstrating such application based integration by incorporating OntAnat into the MorphologyNet query interface.

This project is being conducted collaboratively by the Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas and by the Department of Biological Sciences at Missouri University of Science and Technology. The research being conducted at the University of Arkansas consists of research, development, evaluation and delivery of a software solution to address task 2 on the list. An overview of the research being conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology can be found here.