Abstract
The metadata about scientific experiments published in online repositories have been shown to suffer from a high degree of representational heterogeneity—there are often many ways to represent the same type of information, such as a geographical location via its latitude and longitude. To harness the potential that metadata have for discovering scientific data, it is crucial that they be represented in a uniform way that can be queried effectively. One step toward uniformly-represented metadata is to normalize the multiple, distinct field names used in metadata (e.g., lat lon, lat and long) to describe the same type of value. To that end, we present a new method based on clustering and embeddings (i.e., vector representations of words) to align metadata field names with ontology terms. We apply our method to biomedical metadata by generating embeddings for terms in biomedical ontologies from the BioPortal repository. We carried out a comparative study between our method and the NCBO Annotator, which revealed that our method yields more and substantially better alignments between metadata and ontology terms.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by grant U54 AI117925 awarded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) through funds provided by the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative. BioPortal has been supported by the NIH Common Fund under grant U54 HG004028.
We thank the experts in our evaluation panel: John Graybeal, Josef Hardi, Marcos Martínez-Romero, and Csongor Nyulas (all of whom from the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at Stanford University), for their participation.
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Gonçalves, R.S., Kamdar, M.R., Musen, M.A. (2019). Aligning Biomedical Metadata with Ontologies Using Clustering and Embeddings. In: Hitzler, P., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11503. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_10
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