OC Ontologies
Leverage more chemical and biomedical ontologies than any other platform
Discover complex facts with extreme efficiency
Our ontologies help you transform siloed, unstructured data into machine-readable, standardized formats, allowing your scientists to integrate and compare information internally and with external databases.
Our services combine existing and custom ontologies, enabling you to standardize every bit of information held by your organization, put it in the same language, and then access it in one place.
Ontologies can be applied to align:
- Electronic lab notebooks
- Inhouse Microsoft Office documents
- Scientific literature and patents
- External standard database searches
- Product catalogues
- External text databases (e.g. SEC reports)
What is an ontology?
An ontology formalizes the description of the data held within your research, improving its interoperability and reusability across systems and databases, this is done through a standardized classification of relevant terms.
Not only does this aid the categorization of those terms; an ontology encapsulates a broad spectrum of vocabulary within that particular knowledge domain, allowing scientists to better understand the connection between concepts.
And because our ontologies are optimized for vocabulary classification, text mining and data normalization tasks, they enable scientists to find all related synonyms of a term, and search for class terms rather than just individual concepts.
Concepts
The entities within a domain.
Classes
Groups of concepts with shared properties.
Relationships
The connections between concepts.
Properties
Attributes or characteristics of concepts, including synonyms.
Instances
Specific examples of concepts.
Ontology services for life science and chemistry research
We offer custom-built ontologies for the pharmaceutical, life science, and chemical industries, with datasets that also use classifications and content from publicly available sources and are accessible by all users.
With specialist features tailored to the chemical industry, our built-in-house ontologies allow for new search criteria and allow you to easily integrate your own ontologies as well.
Once implemented, our ontologies enable you to transform your data into actionable insights through the OC Processor, the only product on the market capable of relationship extraction for chemical compounds and structures.
Planning and Requirements
The OntoChem team develops new ontologies based on user requirements collated feedback and advancements within the scientific field. The scope and objectives of the new ontology is defined and domain knowledge is gathered from multiple relevant data sources, such as chEMBL and PubChem, FDA and EMA.
Design
Classes, properties and relationships of the concepts are defined based on the planning and requirements output. The new domains and concepts are inputted into OntoChem’s Sodiac tool.
Validation and Verification
Ontology validation and verification involve key steps to ensure accuracy and functionality of the Named Entity Recognition (NER). These include testing for consistency and completeness to avoid contradictions, expert reviews from the OntoChem ontology team to identify issues, and iterative improvements based on feedback, resulting in a robust and reliable knowledge representation.
Implementation
After the validation and verification process, the additions and changes are implemented. The output being an ontology cartridge that can be accessed via OntoChem’s user interfaces, such as iMart and SciWalker, or via installing the cartridge.