NetON: A new tool for discovering the semantic potential of biomedical data in UMLS semantic network

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Enformatik Enstitüsü, Bilişim Sistemleri Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010

Öğrenci: BİRSEN GÜLDEN ÖZDEMİR

Danışman: NAZİFE BAYKAL

Özet:

The Unified Medical Language System Semantic Network (UMLS SN) being an upper-level abstraction of the biomedical domain has a complex structure due to many relationships, making it difficult for human orientation. Therefore, while the SN is a valuable source for modeling contents of the biomedical domain its usage is limited. NetON was designed and built for the automatic transformation of UMLS SN to OWL sublanguages to support semantic operations between biomedical systems. NetON uses advances in the Semantic Web, a candidate technology for sustaining knowledge intensive tasks. Ontology Web Language (OWL) sublanguage rules are used to represent information in UMLS SN. The major contribution of NetON is the opportunity of automatic transformation of UMLS SN to OWL sublanguages named as OWL Basic Species. The aim of NetON is maximum possible information transformation from UMLS SN. The only information that is not able to be transformed to any OWL Basic Species due to the lack of appropriate constructors in OWL standard is inheritance blockings in UMLS SN. In UMLS SN, there are unseen assertions that can be inferred by using inference rules on explicitly specified assertions which are not essentially valid for all the descendants. Deduction outcomes of any OWL reasoners on NetON OWL Basic Species will also include false positives due to the lack of inheritance blocking information. The algorithms of the second dimension consider the inheritance blocking information while executing inference rules. As this cannot be done by any OWL reasoner, the second dimension offers a solution for application developers.