Table 4 A summary of the synthesised responses to research questions
From: The use of foundational ontologies in biomedical research
ID | Question | Summarised answer |
|---|---|---|
RQ1 | How are foundational ontologies used in biomedical research? | Foundational ontologies have been used in the development of domain ontologies and design patterns, ontology analysis and repair, ontology merging and mapping, and ontology-based data integration and analysis. |
RQ2 | What are the claimed advantages of using foundational ontologies in biomedical research? | The advantages of using foundational ontologies can be classified into two groups: improvement of data and improvement of core or domain ontologies. The former includes enhancing data consistency, interoperability and queriability. The latter is related to the improvement of semantic understanding of ontological terms, reasoning, inconsistencies prevention, ontology interoperability, maintainability, and a faster development process. |
RQ3 | What are the claimed drawbacks of using foundational ontologies in biomedical research? | The drawbacks of using foundational ontologies are related to their complexity and the difficulty in evaluating their claimed advantages. |
RQ4 | What is the empirical evidence for the advantages and drawbacks of using foundational ontologies in biomedical research? | We identified only one paper that performed an empirical assessment of the use of foundational ontologies in a biomedical research-related setting. The experiment did not reach any conclusion due to limited methodology. |
RQ5 | From the total number of papers that describe the development of a biomedical ontology, how many use existing formal ontology development and evaluation methods? | A subset of 49 papers developed a domain ontology. Among those, 16 used an ontology engineering method from the literature, and 34 performed a certain type of ontology evaluation. |