A Method for Evaluating and Standardizing Ontologies

For my thesis work I am developing a method for evaluating and standardizing ontologies based on an integration of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and OntoClean. BFO serves as the upper ontology for the domain ontologies of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The OBO Foundry initiative is a collaborative effort for developing interoperable, science-based ontologies. OntoClean is an approach for the quality assurance of ontologies, and helps a modeler detect when the subsumption relation is used improperly. Ontologies developed for OBO use include some that have been ratified, and others holding the status of “candidate”. To maintain consistency between ontologies, it is important to establish formal principled criteria that a candidate ontology must meet for ratification. The formalisms that result from our integration will serve as criteria an OBO Foundry candidate ontology must satisfy in order to be ratified. The formalisms will also serve as a constraints within a prototype of an ontology editor that interactively asks a modeler questions that helps alleviate constraint violations.