Creation of Definitions for Ontologies: A Case Study in the Leukemia Domain

The creation of the definitions it is an important stage of the activity of ontologies construction, insofar as the definitions provides the understanding of the meaning of classes. However, creating definitions is a complex and tiresome task. This study is part of an ongoing research that analyses some fundamental principles with the aim of formulating textual and formal definitions to be used in ontologies. The context of such analysis is a project of knowledge organization within the biomedical domain. The goal is to establish methodological guidelines for formulating the definitions in biomedical ontologies. In general, people building ontologies do not make use of consistent rules for the correct formulation of definitions, which, we believe, make our study a relevant initiative. As partial results, we present a list of topics that corresponds to the aforementioned methodological guidelines.