Ontology Mapping: A Way Out of the Medical Tower of Babel? (Summary of Invited Talk)

Integration of different information sources has been a problem that has been challenging (or perhaps better: plaguing) Computer Science throughout the decades. As soon as we had two computers, we wanted to exchange information between them, and as soon as we had two databases, we wanted to link them together. Fortunately, Computer Science has made much progress on different levels: Physical interoperability between systems has been all but solved: with the advent of hardware standards such as Ethernet, and with protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP, we can nowadays walk into somebody house or office, and successfully plug our computer into the network, giving instant world-wide physical connectivity. Physical connectivity is not sufficient. We must also agree on the syntactic form of the messages we will exchange. Again, much progress has been made in recent years, with open standards such HTML and XML. Of course, even syntactic interoperability is not enough. We need not only agree on the form of the messages we exchange, but also no the meaning of these messages. This problem of semantic interoperability is still wide open, despite its importance in many application areas, and despite decades of work by different disciplines within Computer Science. It is clear that the problem of semantic interoperability is also plaguing Medical Informatics. Terminological confusion is plaguing the interoperability of data sources, and is hindering automatic support for document searches. [10] provides a study of synonymy and homonymy problems on gene-names in Medline. They established that genes have on the average 2-3 different names; cross-thesaurus homonymy is often up to 30%; and almost half of the of acronyms used to denote human genes also have another meaning in Medline entirely unrelated to human genes. The conclusion of a report [8] by the same research group states: “Information extraction and literature mining efforts will be strongly affected by this ambiguity, and solving this problem is essential for these research fields.”