Evaluating the consistency of inferred drug-class membership re- lations in NDF-RT

Objectives: To evaluate the consistency of inferred drugclass membership relations in NDF-RT (National Drug File Reference Terminology). Methods: We use an OWL reasoner to infer the drug-class membership relations from the class definitions and the descriptions of drugs and compare them to asserted relations. Results: The inferred and asserted relations only match in about 50% of the cases. Conclusions: This investigation quantifies and categorizes the inconsistencies between asserted and inferred drug classes and illustrates issues with class definitions and drug descriptions. Supplementary figure: Overview of the methods, available at: http://mor.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/supp/2014-bioonto-rw/index.html.