ROAR: A Reference Ontology for Anatomical Relations

The ontology has become a useful model for organizing knowledge. This is particularly true in the field of biomedicine, where individual ontologies have been created for specific data domains ranging from genomics through species morphologies to human anatomical reference ontologies. Although specific sets of relationships have been proposed to improve the accuracy and consistency of such ontologies, there has been little to nothing proposed concerning the organization of those relationships. To help address this deficiency, herein we present a Reference Ontology of Anatomical Relations (ROAR). ROAR extends the concepts used in existing biomedical ontologies by defining and hierarchically organizing temporal, spatial, functional, and taxonomic relations based on generalization/specialization and semantic relatedness. Also provided in this paper are examples of how the use of such a reference ontology would significantly increase the ease with which data from multiple ontologies could be developed and integrated and would improve the information base for other computational intelligence activities.