The Ontology of Blood Pressure: a Case Study in Creating Ontological Partitions in Biomedicine

We provide a methodology for the creation of ontological partitions in biomedicine and we test the methodology via an application to the phenomenon of blood pressure. An ontology of blood pressure must do justice to the complex networks of intersecting pathways in the organism by which blood pressure is regulated. To this end it must deal not only with the anatomical structures and physiological processes involved in such regulation but also with the relations between these at different levels of granularity. For this purpose our ontology offers a variety of distinct partitions – of substances, processes and functions – and integrates these together within a single framework via transitive networks of part-whole and dependence relations among the entities in each of these categories. The paper concludes with a comparison of this methodology with the approaches of GO, KEGG, DIP and BIND and provides an outline of how the methodology is currently being applied in the field of biomedical database integration.