Using Philosophy to Improve the Coherence and Interoperability of Applications Ontologies: A Field Report on the Collaboration of IFOMIS and L&C

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software applications purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of philosophical insight and methodology into applications domains yields diverse improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing applications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of structured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as UMLS, SNOMED, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies it embeds.