What's in a 'nym'? Synonyms in Biomedical Ontology Matching

To bring the Life Sciences domain closer to a Semantic Web realization it is fundamental to establish meaningful relations between biomedical ontologies. The successful application of ontology matching techniques is strongly tied to an effective exploration of the complex and diverse biomedical terminology contained in biomedical ontologies. In this paper, we present an overview of the lexical components of several biomedical ontologies and investigate how different approaches for their use can impact the performance of ontology matching techniques. We propose novel approaches for exploring the different types of synonyms encoded by the ontologies and for extending them based both on internal synonym derivation and on external ontologies. We evaluate our approaches using AgreementMaker, a successful ontology matching platform that implements several lexical matchers, and apply them to a set of four benchmark biomedical ontology matching tasks. Our results demonstrate the impact that an adequate consideration of ontology synonyms can have on matching performance, and validate our novel approach for combining internal and external synonym sources as a competitive and in many cases improved solution for biomedical ontology matching.