Analysis and Classification of Bio-ontologies by the Structure of their Labels

Abstract

The development and success of the Gene Ontology were key factors for attracting the interest of biomedical researchers and bioinformaticists to ontologies. In recent years, hundreds of biomedical ontologies have been produced, most of them developed in collaborative e orts and following a set of construction principles, including the use of a systematic naming convention and using descriptive labels. Such ontologies have been mainly used for supporting the annotation process, but more sophisticated uses would require such ontologies to have more axioms. In recent works, we have found that exploiting the structure of the labels could contribute to that axiomatic enrichment. Hence, in this work we perform a study of the labels of the ontologies available in BioPortal to classify them in terms of potential interest for their axiomatic enrichment.