Abstract
Functions play an important role throughoutbiology. Although molecular functions are cov-ered in the Gene Ontology, there is currently nopublicly available ontology of anatomical func-tions. Ontological considerations on the natureof functional abnormalities and their represen-tation in current phenotype ontologies showthat we can automatically extract a skeletonfor such an ontology of anatomical functionsby using a combination of process, phenotypeand anatomy ontologies. We provide an onto-logical analysis of the nature of functions andfunctional abnormalities. From this analysis,we derive an approach to the automatic ex-traction of anatomical functions from existingontologies using a combination of natural lan-guage processing, graph-based analysis of theontologies and formal inferences. Alternatively,we introduce a new relation to relate materialobjects to processes that realize the functionof the object to avoid a needless duplication ofprocesses already present in the Gene Ontol-ogy in a new ontology of anatomical functions.We discuss several limitations of the currentontologies that still need to be addressed to en-sure a consistent and complete representationof anatomical functions and functional abnor-malities.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the The 3rd International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine |
Publication status | Published - 01 Oct 2009 |
Event | Symposium for Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2008) - Turku, Finland Duration: 01 Sept 2008 → 03 Sept 2008 |
Conference
Conference | Symposium for Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM 2008) |
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Country/Territory | Finland |
City | Turku |
Period | 01 Sept 2008 → 03 Sept 2008 |