In an interdisziplinary field like health care various knowledge domains are utilizied. Furthermore, also the point of view on an entity shared by different specialist. A disease have different meanings to the molecular pathology, the attending doctor or the billing department. Ontologies may help to bridge this gap by defining entities and set them in relation. Ontologies can help to bridge this gap by defining entities of a knowledge domain and set them in relation to entities of the same domain or other domains.

Work package 4, led by Edgar Wingender, makes available to the consortium all biomedical ontologies that are required for either manual or, wherever possible, automatic extraction of necessary information from the relevant sources, to integrate them into a comprehensive knowledge base (WP2: Infrastructure) and to render them amenable for automatic pathway reconstruction (WP3: Pathways). Among these ontologies, the Cytomer ontology of anatomical concepts maintained by the group for more than 15 years will become one important building block.

For processing the semantic content of the ontologies the functionality of the OBA (Ontology Based Answers) service developed earlier by this group has been extended by adding more semantic functions.

One of the results of this workpackage are mappings between different resources, which are important for the project. We provide them here, so that they can also be used elsewhere. The mapping was done automatically and then validated and completed manually.