Analysis of the evolution of ontologies using OQuaRE: Application to EDAM

Abstract

In recent years, the biomedical community has developed a significant number of ontologies. The curation of biomedical ontologies is a complex task, which has the practical implication of a high number of versions of ontologies in short time, because biomedical ontologies evolve rapidly. New versions are periodically published in ontology repositories. Ontology designers need to be supported for the effective management of the evolution of biomedical ontologies given this level of activity, because the different changes may affect the engineering and quality of the ontology. This is why we think that there is a need for methods that contribute to the analysis of the effects of changes and evolution of ontologies. In this paper we approach this issue from the ontology quality perspective. In previous works we have developed an ontology evaluation framework based on quantitative metrics, called OQuaRE. Here, OQuaRE will be used as a core component in a method that permits to analyze the different versions of biomedical ontologies using a common framework. The objective is to help ontology developers to study the evolution of ontology versions in terms of changes in the quality dimensions analyzed in OQuaRE. In this work we explain how OQuaRE can be adapted for supporting this process and report the application of the method to 16 versions of the EDAM ontology. Discussion is provided on the evolution of the quality scores of those versions according to the OQuaRE quality perspective.