Designing a Rule-Based Environment to Interoperate Life-Scientific Ontologies for Drug Discovery

Life-scientific databases can accelerate medicine. However, the diversity among these databases has been a problem for researchers who query these databases. Under this situation, the concept of ontology is expected to be an important key to aggregate these databases and conceal their diversity. This paper discusses two methods for deriving and describing relationships between life-scientific ontologies in a context of drug discovery. Although an ontology is designed to interrelate a set of terms, it is difficult to interrelate terms in different ontologies using a standard ontology language, OWL. This paper illustrates a new rule-based method for interoperating ontologies. This method will be adaptive to various ontologies on the Web, although it is currently in the first stage of development.