Using Abstraction Network in Complement to DL for Quality Assurance Purposes in Biomedical Terminologies

Introduction Quality assurance is a demanding task for large biomedical terminologies during the development and maintenance process. The Description Logic (DL) serves as the basis of terminology classification and consistency checking for quite a few large terminologies, such as SNOMED CT [1], Galen[2], and NCIT[3]. Without doubt, to some extend DL helps the quality assurance of the terminology system; however, a lot of errors are still hanging around the system, which seems that DL alone is not enough to create an error-free system.