SAMBO—A system for aligning and merging biomedical ontologies

Due to the recent explosion of the amount of on-line accessible biomedical data and tools, finding and retrieving the relevant information is not an easy task. The vision of a Semantic Web for life sciences alleviates these difficulties. A key technology for the Semantic Web is ontologies. In recent years many biomedical ontologies have been developed and many of these ontologies contain overlapping information. To be able to use multiple ontologies they have to be aligned or merged. In this paper we propose a framework for aligning and merging ontologies. Further, we developed a system for aligning and merging biomedical ontologies (SAMBO) based on this framework. The framework is also a first step towards a general framework that can be used for comparative evaluations of alignment strategies and their combinations. In this paper we evaluated different strategies and their combinations in terms of quality and processing time and compared SAMBO with two other systems.