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An Extensible Ontology Modeling Approach Using Post Coordinated Expressions for Semantic Provenance in Biomedical Research

  • Joshua Valdez
  • Michael Rueschman
  • Matthew Kim
  • Sara Arabyarmohammadi
  • Susan Redline
  • Satya S. SahooEmail author
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 10574)

Abstract

Provenance metadata describing the source or origin of data is critical to verify and validate results of scientific experiments. Indeed, reproducibility of scientific studies is rapidly gaining significant attention in the research community, for example biomedical and healthcare research. To address this challenge in the biomedical research domain, we have developed the Provenance for Clinical and Healthcare Research (ProvCaRe) using World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) PROV specifications, including the PROV Ontology (PROV-O). In the ProvCaRe project, we are extending PROV-O to create a formal model of provenance information that is necessary for scientific reproducibility and replication in biomedical research. However, there are several challenges associated with the development of the ProvCaRe ontology, including: (1) Ontology engineering: modeling all biomedical provenance-related terms in an ontology has undefined scope and is not feasible before the release of the ontology; (2) Redundancy: there are a large number of existing biomedical ontologies that already model relevant biomedical terms; and (3) Ontology maintenance: adding or deleting terms from a large ontology is error prone and it will be difficult to maintain the ontology over time. Therefore, in contrast to modeling all classes and properties in an ontology before deployment (also called precoordination), we propose the “ProvCaRe Compositional Grammar Syntax” to model ontology classes on-demand (also called postcoordination). The compositional grammar syntax allows us to re-use existing biomedical ontology classes and compose provenance-specific terms that extend PROV-O classes and properties. We demonstrate the application of this approach in the ProvCaRe ontology and the use of the ontology in the development of the ProvCaRe knowledgebase that consists of more than 38 million provenance triples automatically extracted from 384,802 published research articles using a text processing workflow.

Keywords

Precoordinated and postcoordinated expression Ontology engineering Provenance metadata W3C PROV specification ProvCaRe semantic provenance 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

This work is supported in part by the National Institutes of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) grant (1U01EB020955) NSF grant# 1636850

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Joshua Valdez
    • 1
  • Michael Rueschman
    • 2
  • Matthew Kim
    • 2
  • Sara Arabyarmohammadi
    • 1
  • Susan Redline
    • 2
  • Satya S. Sahoo
    • 1
    Email author
  1. 1.Institute for Computational Biology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science DepartmentCase Western Reserve UniversityClevelandUSA
  2. 2.Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical CenterHarvard UniversityBostonUSA

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