Ontology Design for Pharmaceutical Research Outcomes

Abstract

The network of scholarly publishing involves generating and exchanging ideas, certifying research, publishing in order to disseminate findings, and preserving outputs. Despite enormous efforts in providing support for each of those steps in scholarly communication, identifying knowledge fragments is still a big challenge. This is due to the heterogeneous nature of the scholarly data and the current paradigm of distribution by publishing (mostly document-based) over journal articles, numerous repositories, and libraries. Therefore, transforming this paradigm to knowledge-based representation is expected to reform the knowledge sharing in the scholarly world. Although many movements have been initiated in recent years, non-technical scientific communities suffer from transforming document-based publishing to knowledge-based publishing. In this paper, we present a model (PharmSci) for scholarly publishing in the pharmaceutical research domain with the goal of facilitating knowledge discovery through effective ontology-based data integration. PharmSci provides machine-interpretable information to the knowledge discovery process. The principles and guidelines of the ontological engineering have been followed. Reasoning-based techniques are also presented in the design of the ontology to improve the quality of targeted tasks for data integration. The developed ontology is evaluated with a validation process and also a quality verification method.