COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE - SCALE BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGIES - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 194

sent. The reviewers may enter their reviews directly in WebProtégé. Reviews
are a specifi c note type and are represented as instances of a Review class in
the ChAO.

12.3.4 Reusing Terms from Other Ontologies

It is a common case that large-scale biomedical ontologies need to import or
reference terms in other biomedical ontologies and terminologies.
To support this task, we developed a generic Reference portlet that
searches terms in ontologies stored in the BioPortal ontology repository.
BioPortal offers an archive of over 200 ontologies and terminologies for the
biomedical domain that can be accessed through a Web browser or through
Web services. We describe the collaboration features of BioPortal in more
detail in Section 12.5.
The Reference portlet uses RESTful Web services to search for terms in
BioPortal. For example, one can imagine a scenario in which a property, say,
bodyPart, for an entity Acute Myocardial Infarction, should be a reference to
the term Heart in SNOMED-CT. The portlet allows the user to search for the
string “heart” in the version of SNOMED-CT stored in BioPortal (Fig. 12.8).
The search will return a list of matched terms for the search string “heart.” To
decide which SNOMED-CT term to import, the user may get more informa-
tion about each search result either in textual form or as a graph visualization

Figure 12.8 BioPortal reference portlet. The user selects a class in the class tree (A).
In order to fi ll in the value for body part (B), she uses the widget to search BioPortal
(C) and to select the appropriate body part from SNOMED-CT. The reference is then
added as a link to SNOMED-CT.