Affiliations: BC Cancer Agency and Department of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. E-mail: mcourtot@gmail.com, rbrinkman@bccrc.ca | Royal Pharmaceutical Society, London SE1 7JN, UK. E-mail: fgibson@gmail.com | CISBAN and School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. E-mail: a.l.lister@newcastle.ac.uk | The European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, CB10 1SD, UK. E-mail: malone@ebi.ac.uk | Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics, University Medical Center, 70104 Freiburg, Germany. E-mail: schober@imbi.uni-freiburg.de | Science Commons, Cambridge, MA, USA. E-mail: alanruttenberg@gmail.com
Note: [] Corresponding author: Mélanie Courtot, BC Cancer Agency and Department of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. E-mail: mcourtot@gmail.com.
Abstract: While the Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides a mechanism to import ontologies, this mechanism is not always suitable. Current editing tools present challenges for working with large ontologies and direct OWL imports can prove impractical for day-to-day development. Furthermore, external ontologies often undergo continuous change which can introduce conflicts when integrated with multiple efforts. Finally, importing heterogeneous ontologies in their entirety may lead to inconsistencies or unintended inferences. In this paper we propose a set of guidelines for importing required terms from an external resource into a target ontology. We describe the methodology, its implementation, present some examples of this application, and outline future work and extensions.
Keywords: Ontology import, data integration, MIREOT
