Ranganathans Canons Applied to Ontology Engineering: a Sample Application Scenario in Biomedical ontologies

Ranganathan, an Indian mathematician and librarian, has proposed a set of comprehensible canons to provide guidance to the process of building concept hierarchies. It is our proposition that Ranganathans canons can contribute to fulfill the gap between the high-level domain conceptualization guided by top level ontologies and the classification of such concepts within facets, needed when building ontologies taxonomical structures. In order to show the utility of Ranganathans canons applied to ontology structuring, we have analyzed the structure of a biomedical ontology: Gene Ontology (GO). As result, we have found that many of the existing inconsistencies on GO hierarchies could be avoided if Ranganathans canons were adopted.