The benefits of centralizing ontology management

Ontologies play a critical role in semantic enrichment, enabling unstructured scientific text to be transformed into clean, contextualized data which can be understood and exploited by computational approaches, such as machine learning. Historically, maintaining multiple, evolving ontologies from both public and proprietary sources, has been a complex undertaking, requiring a high degree of ontology expertise.

There are often several independently developed ontologies within a single domain that contain overlapping and even conflicting information. In addition, many pharmaceutical companies also have their own proprietary lists, such as project codes and compound IDs.

SciBite’s brand-new ontology management platform CENtree provides a centralised, enterprise-ready resource for ontology management and transforms the experience of maintaining and releasing ontologies for research-led businesses. We’ve combined ease of use with cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques to assist users, for example, by suggesting possible relationships for a given class.

At SciBite, we’re an advocate of FAIR data. CENtree uses open standards, ensuring there is no ‘lock in’ to proprietary language or formats when managing ontologies. Users can upload locally-stored ontology files from public repositories and can specify if an entire ontology or a more specific subset should be imported.

When working with ontologies, version control is critically important. In CENtree, if users edit public ontologies, the changes can be reconciled with new releases. A merged view of the combined ontology highlights any conflicts, enabling curators to focus on things that need to be addressed.

The next blog in our ‘Ontologies with SciBite’ series discusses the benefits for simplifying visualization and curation.

Learn more about CENtree and how it can transform the way your company collaboratively manages ontologies. Contact the team to find out more or download the CENtree datasheet.

Download datasheet