Semantic Similarity in Biomedical Ontologies: measurement, assessment and applications

Date

Sep 28, 2012

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker

Dr. Francisco Couto

Affiliation

University Lisbon, Faculty of Science

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Other Topics

Biologie

Host

Michael Schroeder

Description

The analysis of complex biomedical entities and events, such as disease and epidemiological models, is challenging due to their multiple domain features, and thus to accurately describe them we need to use concepts from multiple biomedical ontologies, such as gene mutations, protein functions, anatomical parts and phenotypes. The usefulness of ontological annotations to interlink and interpret biomedical information is widely recognized, particularly for retrieving related information. This relatedness can be captured by semantic similarity measures that return a numerical value reflecting the closeness in meaning between two ontology concepts or two annotated entities. These measures have been successfully applied to biomedical ontologies, particularly to the Gene Ontology, for comparing proteins based on the similarity of their functions. This talk will discuss ongoing efforts to calculate semantic similarity, describe popular techniques used to calculate their effectiveness, and present existing biomedical applications that use semantic similarity measures to improve their performance.

Last modified: Sep 10, 2012, 6:12:17 PM