Evolution of biomedical ontologies and mappings: Overview of recent approaches <s> Discussion <s> The highly dynamic nature of domain ontologies has a direct impact on semantic mappings established between concepts from different ontologies. Mappings must therefore be maintained according to ongoing ontology changes. Since many software applications exploit mappings for managing information and knowledge, it is important to define appropriate adaptation strategies to apply to existing mappings in order to keep their validity over time. In this article, we propose a set of mapping adaptation actions and present how they are used to maintain mappings up-to-date based on ontology change operations of different nature. We conduct an experimental evaluation using life sciences ontologies and mappings. We measure the evolution of mappings based on the proposed approach to mapping adaptation. The results confirm that mappings must be individually adapted according to the different types of ontology change. <s> BIB001 </s> Evolution of biomedical ontologies and mappings: Overview of recent approaches <s> Discussion <s> The continuous evolution of life science ontologies requires the adaptation of their associated mappings. We propose two approaches for tackling this problem in a largely automatic way: (1) a composition-based adaptation relying on the principle of mapping composition and (2) a diff-based adaptation algorithm individually handling change operations to update the mapping. Both techniques reuse unaffected correspondences, and adapt only the affected mapping part. We experimentally assess and confirm the effectiveness of our approaches for evolving mappings between large life science ontologies. <s> BIB002
The evaluations of the approaches showed to be quite heterogeneous and difficult to compare, e.g. they differ in the used ontologies and analysis focus. While several studies considered large ontologies, efficiency and scalability have not yet been analyzed in detail. Only two studies evaluated the quality of the adapted mappings. Dos Reis et al. BIB001 analyzed how often their proposed adaptation actions actually occurred in real world ontology mapping versions. Groß et al. BIB002 evaluated the mapping correctness and completeness by computing precision and recall (F-Measure of 90-94%) for the automatically adapted mappings compared to the actually released mapping versions. For sure, users cannot rely on fully automatically generated mappings. Therefore, the produced recommendations need to be verified and corrected by expert users. Some approaches require and allow for user interaction, e.g., by marking uncertain correspondences for verification BIB002 . However, no system provides a really comfortable way such as a visualized workflow to guide expert users through the verification and quality control process. Overall, there are promising strategies to semi-automatically migrate ontology-based mappings when the underlying ontologies evolve. However, further research and careful evaluation for different kinds of ontologies and ontology-based applications are still necessary as well as the integration of the approaches within user-friendly tools.