Merging and comparing ontologies

Abstract The use of formal systems to define biomedical concepts and to represent and store biomedical knowledge has never been more important to the informatics community. In the past few years, ontologies have become the cornerstone of the information‐systems research. With the wider use of ontologies, the problem of ontology management began to arise: ontology developers and users must be able to find and compare existing ontologies or their parts, merge and align ontologies, compare different versions, and translate ontologies from one formalism to another. We describe various approaches to the ontology‐management tasks and the recent developments in defining a general ontology‐management framework.