Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

Things change. Words change, meanings and context change. To manage a large volume of evolving bio-medical data of various types, one needs to employ several techniques from areas such as knowledge representation, semantic web and databases. Many of these techniques require a formal description of a part of the real world. Ontologies can provide a set of shared and precisely defined terms in various degrees of formality to describe a particular domain of interest. When the knowledge changes, then the related definitions will be altered. Changes to ontologies may occur for many reasons. The issues arising from ontological change can affect the validity of information in applications that are tightly bound to concepts in a particular ontological context. Many knowledge-based systems are now reaching a stage where they need a change management strategy to update their ontological knowledge. This area is becoming increasingly important in science as high throughput techniques frequently necessitate updates to existing scientific 'truths'. In this chapter, we survey and review state of the art change management in bio-ontologies as well as some of the available tools and techniques in this area. We also survey various potential changes in biomedical ontologies, with actual examples from some of the most popular ontologies in the biomedical domain. In addition we investigate the potential of some of the advanced formalisms in this context by proposing our formal method for analyzing and supporting ontology evolution and change management.