Representing and Connecting the Biomedical Science through the Applied Ontology Discipline

Abstract

Several obstacles remain for Biomedicine in reusing, disseminating and sharing specialized knowledge for information systems. The Biomedical literature is inherently ambiguous, systems developers suffer from some idiosyncrasy and solipsism, and there is not an unique standard, to mention just a few issues. The lack of integration among information systems, the so-called problem of interoperability, prevents Biomedical scientists to meet the best levels of collaboration to advance biomedical science. Ontologies have been adopted in the biomedical field as tool to address the massive volume of data produced each day during the last 30 or 20 years. In this paper, we emphasize the pursuit for solutions not only through technological resources, since we believe that any effort should include well-stablished principles for modeling provided by the discipline of Applied Ontology.