Investigating term reuse and overlap in biomedical ontologies

We investigate the current extent of term reuse and overlap among biomedical ontologies. We use the corpus of biomedical ontologies stored in the BioPortal repository, and analyze three types of reuse constructs: (a) explicit term reuse, (b) xref reuse, and (c) Concept Unique Identifier (CUI) reuse. While there is a term label similarity of approximately 14.4% of the total terms, we observed that most ontologies reuse considerably fewer than 5% of their terms from a concise set of a few core ontologies. We developed an interactive visualization to explore reuse dependencies among biomedical ontologies. Moreover, we identified a set of patterns that indicate ontology developers did intend to reuse terms from other ontologies, but they were using different and sometimes incorrect representations. Our results suggest the value of semi-automated tools that augment term reuse in the ontology engineering process through personalized recommendations.