Survey of current terminologies and ontologies in biology and medicine - DOI: 10.3395/reciis.v3i1.239en

Abstract

This paper provides a survey of the state of the art in terminologies and ontologies applied to Biology and Medicine. Not intending to be fully comprehensive, we describe some of the most relevant resources that currently attract interest from industry and academia. We introduce a description framework and compare the systems in terms of their architectural elements, their expressiveness, and coverage, as well as analyze the nature of entities they denote. In particular, we scrutinize the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the Gene Ontology (GO), the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), the Generalized Architecture for Languages, Encyclopaedias and Nomenclatures (openGALEN), the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), and the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry.

Keywords

• Terminologies
• ontologies
• biology
• medicine