Ontology Evolution: MEDLINE Case Study

With the rising importance of knowledge interchange, many industrial and academic applications have adopted ontologies as their conceptual backbone. Business dynamics and changes in the operating environment often give rise to continuous changes in application requirements that may be fulfilled only by changing the underlying ontologies. This is especially true for Semantic Web applications, which are based on heterogeneous and highly distributed information resources and therefore need efficient mechanisms to cope with changes in the environment. In our previous work we have developed the KAON ontology evolution framework that (i) enables handling the required ontology changes; (ii) ensures the consistency of the underlying ontology and all dependent artefacts; (iii) supports the user to manage changes more easily; and (iv) offers advice to the user for continual ontology reengineering. In this paper we apply the proposed approach on the MEDLINE system and discuss its benefits. First, we translated the MeSH/MEDLINE into a set of the ontologies by enriching the MeSH vocabulary with the set of rules and by eliminating some inconsistencies. Second, we showed that ontology evolution ensures the consistency between all related data. Third, we indicated how formal semantics provided by an ontology might be useful to improve the indexing in the existing MEDLINE system.