Normalizing Medical Ontologies using Basic Formal Ontology

Description Logics [1] are nowadays widely accepted as formalisms for implementing rigorous domain ontologies, and have been used in biomedicine in projects such as GONG [2] and SNOMED-CT [3]. A key feature of such ontologies is that the associated reasoning facilities allow us to discover inconsistencies and other problems in an automatic fashion. This is important since ontologies of complex domains such as medicine are large and complex and have been built by many people over long periods of time. The DL reasoning facilities allow ontologies to be developed in modular fashion, where changes in one module that affect other modules are propogated through the system automatically by the reasoner in a way which helps to maintain consistency and stability in the ontology as a whole.