Ontology Design Patterns for Combining Pathology and Anatomy: Application to Study Ageing and Longevity in Inbred Mouse Strains

Overview

Abstract

In biomedical research, ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge as well as annotate datasets. Many of the existing ontologies cover a single type of phenomena, such as a process, cell type, gene, pathological entity or anatomical structure. Consequently, it is required to use multiple ontologies to fully characterize the observations in the datasets. Although this allows precise annotation of different aspects of a given dataset, it limits our ability to use the ontologies in data analysis, as the ontologies are usually disconnected and their combination cannot be exploited.

Motivated by this, here we present novel ontology design methods for combining pathology and anatomy concepts. To this end, we use a dataset of mouse models which has been characterized through two ontologies: one of them is the mouse pathology ontology (MPATH) covering pathological lesions while the other one is the mouse anatomy ontology (MA) covering the anatomical site of the lesions. We propose four novel ontology design patterns for combining these ontologies and use these patterns to generate four ontologies in a data-driven way.

To evaluate the generated ontologies, we utilize them in ontology-based data analysis, including ontology enrichment analysis and computation of semantic similarity. We demonstrate that there are significant differences between the four ontologies in different analysis approaches. In addition, when using semantic similarity to confirm the hypothesis that genetically identical mice should develop more similar diseases, the generated combined ontologies lead to significantly better analysis results compared to using each ontology individually. Our results reveal that using ontology design patterns to combine different facets characterizing a dataset can improve established analysis methods.