Creating Biomedical Ontologies Using mOntage

The growing volume of biomedical data available on the Web has contributed to numerous scientific advancements. At the same time, the complex, versatile and disparate nature of the data can overburden the knowledge discovery and data-driven hypothesis generation by scientists. Ontologies have been proposed to address the data integration challenge, however, creating useful domain-specific ontologies and populating them with high quality instances is tedious and time-consuming. In this paper, we present the mOntage framework to rapidly create ontologies representing data in a specific area of interest. We show how the mOntage framework can be used to create and populate biomedical ontologies from existing data sources. The classes and properties of the ontology being created are mapped to and instantiated from the existing data sources by executing suitable SPARQL queries. We illustrate our framework by creating a Phosphatase Ontology and show how it can serve as an important source of knowledge in the area of phosphatases.