Aligning multiple anatomical ontologies through a reference

Objective: To investigate the feasibility of deriving an indirect alignment between two ontologies from the two direct alignments of these ontologies to a reference ontology. The three anatomical ontologies under investigation are the Adult Mouse Anatomical Dictionary (MA), the NCI Thesaurus (NCI) and the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). Methods: The direct alignment employs a combination of lexical and structural similarity. The indirect alignment simply derives mappings from direct alignments to the reference ontology. Each of the three ontologies is used, in turn, as the reference and evaluated against the other two ontologies