Welcome to the InfoSci Platform
A Formal Approach to Evaluating Medical Ontology Systems using Naturalness

A Formal Approach to Evaluating Medical Ontology Systems using Naturalness

Yoo Jung An, Kuo-Chuan Huang, Soon Ae Chun, James Geller
Copyright: © 2010 |Volume: 1 |Issue: 1 |Pages: 18
ISSN: 1947-3133|EISSN: 1947-3141|ISSN: 1947-3133|EISBN13: 9781616929725|EISSN: 1947-3141|DOI: 10.4018/jcmam.2010072001
Cite Article Cite Article

MLA

An, Yoo Jung, et al. "A Formal Approach to Evaluating Medical Ontology Systems using Naturalness." IJCMAM vol.1, no.1 2010: pp.1-18. http://doi.org/10.4018/jcmam.2010072001

APA

An, Y. J., Huang, K., Chun, S. A., & Geller, J. (2010). A Formal Approach to Evaluating Medical Ontology Systems using Naturalness. International Journal of Computational Models and Algorithms in Medicine (IJCMAM), 1(1), 1-18. http://doi.org/10.4018/jcmam.2010072001

Chicago

An, Yoo Jung, et al. "A Formal Approach to Evaluating Medical Ontology Systems using Naturalness," International Journal of Computational Models and Algorithms in Medicine (IJCMAM) 1, no.1: 1-18. http://doi.org/10.4018/jcmam.2010072001

Export Reference

Mendeley
Favorite Full-Issue Download

Abstract

Ontologies, terminologies and vocabularies are popular repositories for collecting the terms used in a domain.It may be expected that in the future more such ontologies will be created for domain experts. However, there is increasing interest in making the language of experts understandable to casual users. For example, cancer patients often research their cases on the Web. The authors consider the problem of objectively evaluating the quality of ontologies (QoO). This article formalizes the notion of naturalness as a component of QoO and quantitatively measures naturalness for well-known ontologies (UMLS, WordNet, OpenCyc) based on their concepts, IS-A relationships and semantic relationships. To compute numeric values characterizing the naturalness of an ontology, this article defines appropriate metrics. As absolute numbers in such a pursuit are often meaningless, we concentrate on using relative naturalness metrics. That allows us to say that a certain ontology is relatively more natural than another one.

Request Access

You do not own this content. Please login to recommend this title to your institution's librarian or purchase it from the IGI Global bookstore.