Taxonomies and ontologies are seeing a resurgence of interest and usage because of the advances in big data, machine learning and integration of data. At the recently concluded Taxonomy Boot Camp 2018 at Washington, DC, Deborah McGuinness, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair, & Professor, Computer, Cognitive & Web Sciences, RPI, looked at the importance of taxonomies and ontologies. In a keynote titled “‘Smart’ Taxonomy- and Ontology-Enabled Resources”, she examined the strategies for creating the taxonomies and ontologies that endure over time.
McGuinness notes that the existing models of labor-intensive, centralized vocabulary construction and maintenance do not mesh well in today’s interdisciplinary world. For building and maintaining large collaborative, interdisciplinary vocabularies, an open source extensible ontology leveraging best-in-class terminologies is required. An open source extensible ontology is needed considering it facilitates Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data and services that support data analysis and interdisciplinary research.
Furthermore, ontologies are critical for encoding terms and their inter-relationships, thereby providing a foundation for understanding interoperability and reusability (the I and R in FAIR). Similarly, ontology-enabled infrastructures use knowledge graphs and ontology-enabled search services provide support for finding and accessing relevant content (the F and A in FAIR).
Click here to read the key points to remember while embarking on a new ontology project.
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