Collecting Community-Based Mappings in an Ontology Repository

Several ontology repositories provide access to the growing collection of ontologies on the Semantic Web. Some repositories collect ontologies automatically by crawling the Web; in other repositories, users submit ontologies themselves. In addition to providing search across multiple ontologies, the added value of ontology repositories lies in the metadata that they may contain. This metadata may include information provided by ontology authors, such as ontologies’ scope and intended use; feedback provided by users such as their experiences in using the ontologies or reviews of the content; and

mapping metadata

that relates concepts from different ontologies. In this paper, we focus on the ontology-mapping metadata and on community-based method to collect ontology mappings. More specifically, we develop a model for representing mappings collected from the user community and the metadata associated with the mapping. We use the model to bring together more than 30,000 mappings from 7 sources. We also validate the model by extending BioPortal–a repository of biomedical ontologies that we have developed—to enable users to create single concept-to-concept mappings in its graphical user interface, to upload and download mappings created with other tools, to comment on the mappings and to discuss them, and to visualize the mappings and the corresponding metadata.