in Adrian Paschke, Albert Burger, Andrea Splendiani, M. Scott Marshall, Paolo Romano: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences, Berlin,Germany, December 8-10, 2010
In this work, we develop an intelligent user interface that allows users to enter biomedical queries in a natural language, and that presents the answers (possibly with explanations if requested) in a natural language. We develop a rule layer over biomedical ontologies and databases, and use automated reasoners to answer queries considering relevant parts of the rule layer.
Despite the large-scale uptake of semantic technologies in the biomedical domain, little is known about common modelling practices in published ontologies. OWL ontologies are often published only in the crude form of sets of axioms leaving the underlying design opaque. However, a principled and systematic ontology development life cycle is likely to be reflected in regularities of the ontology's emergent syntactic structure. To develop an understanding of this emergent structure, we propose to reverse-engineer ontologies taking a syntax-directed approach for identifying and analysing regularit…
The extraction of logically-independent fragments out of an ontology ABox can be useful for solving the tractability problem of querying ontologies with large ABoxes. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of an ABox module, such that it guarantees complete preservation of facts about a given set of individuals, and thus can be reasoned independently w.r.t. the ontology TBox. With ABox modules of this type, isolated or distributed (parallel) ABox reasoning becomes feasible, and more efficient data retrieval from ontology ABoxes can be attained. To compute such an ABox module, we present…
Automatic Mapping of AutomationML Files to Ontologies for Graph Queries and Validation
Institute of Automation Technology, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany(海德堡-哈根大学自动化技术研究所);Chair of Automation Technology, Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany(鲁尔大学自动化技术教授职位)
Ontologies usually suffer from the semantic heterogeneity when simultaneously used in information sharing, merging, integrating and querying processes. Therefore, the similarity identification between ontologies being used becomes a mandatory task for all these processes to handle the problem of semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique for similarity measurement between two ontologies. The proposed technique identifies all candidate pairs of similar concepts without omitting any similar pair. The proposed technique can be used in different types of operations on…
University of A Coruña(拉科鲁尼亚大学);University of Montpellier(蒙彼利埃大学)
Biomedical researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new …
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)(阿卜杜拉国王科技大学)
Motivation: Ontologies are widely used in biology for data annotation, integration, and analysis. In addition to formally structured axioms, ontologies contain meta-data in the form of annotation axioms which provide valuable pieces of information that characterize ontology classes. Annotations commonly used in ontologies include class labels, descriptions, or synonyms. Despite being a rich source of semantic information, the ontology meta-data are generally unexploited by ontology-based analysis methods such as semantic similarity measures. Results: We propose a novel method, OPA2Vec, to gene…
Logical theories in the form of ontologies and similar artefacts in computing and IT are used for structuring, annotating, and querying data, among others, and therewith influence data analytics regarding what is fed into the algorithms. Algorithmic bias is a well-known notion, but what does bias mean in the context of ontologies that provide a structuring mechanism for an algorithm's input? What are the sources of bias there and how would they manifest themselves in ontologies? We examine and enumerate types of bias relevant for ontologies, and whether they are explicit or implicit. These eig…
Athens University of Economics and Business(雅典经济与商业大学);Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Research Center ‘Athena’(“雅典娜”研究中心语言与语音处理研究所);Google Research(谷歌研究院);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);Univ. Paris Diderot(巴黎第七大学)
Network Embedding (NE) methods, which map network nodes to low-dimensional feature vectors, have wide applications in network analysis and bioinformatics. Many existing NE methods rely only on network structure, overlooking other information associated with the nodes, e.g., text describing the nodes. Recent attempts to combine the two sources of information only consider local network structure. We extend NODE2VEC, a well-known NE method that considers broader network structure, to also consider textual node descriptors using recurrent neural encoders. Our method is evaluated on link predictio…
Biomedical ontology refers to a shared conceptualization for a biomedical domain of interest that has vastly improved data management and data sharing through the open data movement. The rapid growth and availability of biomedical data make it impractical and computationally expensive to perform manual analysis and query processing with the large scale ontologies. The lack of ability in analyzing ontologies from such a variety of sources, and supporting knowledge discovery for clinical practice and biomedical research should be overcome with new technologies. In this study, we developed a Medi…
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Graz University of Technology(格拉茨技术大学);GESIS(莱布尼茨社会科学研究所);University of Koblenz-Landau(科布伦茨-兰道大学)
Ontologies in the biomedical domain are numerous, highly specialized and very expensive to develop. Thus, a crucial prerequisite for ontology adoption and reuse is effective support for exploring and finding existing ontologies. Towards that goal, the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) has developed BioPortal---an online repository designed to support users in exploring and finding more than 500 existing biomedical ontologies. In 2016, BioPortal represents one of the largest portals for exploration of semantic biomedical vocabularies and terminologies, which is used by many researc…
Efficiently querying Description Logic (DL) ontologies is becoming a vital task in various data-intensive DL applications. Considered as a basic service for answering object queries over DL ontologies, instance checking can be realized by using the most specific concept (MSC) method, which converts instance checking into subsumption problems. This method, however, loses its simplicity and efficiency when applied to large and complex ontologies, as it tends to generate very large MSC's that could lead to intractable reasoning. In this paper, we propose a revision to this MSC method for DL SHI, …
University of Liverpool(利物浦大学);University of Bremen(不来梅大学)
We study the complexity of ontology-mediated querying when ontologies are formulated in the guarded fragment of first-order logic (GF). Our general aim is to classify the data complexity on the level of ontologies where query evaluation w.r.t. an ontology O is considered to be in PTime if all (unions of conjunctive) queries can be evaluated in PTime w.r.t. O and coNP-hard if at least one query is coNP-hard w.r.t. O. We identify several large and relevant fragments of GF that enjoy a dichotomy between PTime and coNP, some of them additionally admitting a form of counting. In fact, almost all on…
University of Oxford(牛津大学);Università della Calabria(卡拉布里亚大学)
The use of preferences in query answering, both in traditional databases and in ontology-based data access, has recently received much attention, due to its many real-world applications. In this paper, we tackle the problem of top-k query answering in Datalog+/- ontologies subject to the querying user's preferences and a collection of (subjective) reports of other users. Here, each report consists of scores for a list of features, its author's preferences among the features, as well as other information. Theses pieces of information of every report are then combined, along with the querying us…
Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt(阿尔卑斯-亚德里亚大学克拉根福分校)
When ontologies reach a certain size and complexity, faults such as inconsistencies, unsatisfiable classes or wrong entailments are hardly avoidable. Locating the incorrect axioms that cause these faults is a hard and time-consuming task. Addressing this issue, several techniques for semi-automatic fault localization in ontologies have been proposed. Often, these approaches involve a human expert who provides answers to system-generated questions about the intended (correct) ontology in order to reduce the possible fault locations. To suggest as informative questions as possible, existing meth…
Institute of Mathematics, Novosibirsk State University(新西伯利亚国立大学数学研究所);Institute of Informatics Systems, Novosibirsk State University(新西伯利亚国立大学信息系统研究所)
We introduce an extension to the Protege ontology editor, which allows for discovering concept definitions, which are not explicitly present in axioms, but are logically implied by an ontology. The plugin supports ontologies formulated in the Description Logic EL, which underpins the OWL 2 EL profile of the Web Ontology Language and despite its limited expressiveness captures most of the biomedical ontologies published on the Web. The developed tool allows to verify whether a concept can be defined using a vocabulary of interest specified by a user. In particular, it allows to decide whether s…
Background: Understanding the distinction between function and role is vexing and difficult. While it appears to be useful, in practice this distinction is hard to apply, particularly within biology. Results: I take an evolutionary approach, considering a series of examples, to develop and generate definitions for these concepts. I test them in practice against the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). Finally, I give an axiomatisation and discuss methods for applying these definitions in practice. Conclusions: The definitions in this paper are applicable, formalizing current practice.…
In this article, we investigate our early attempts at building an ontology describing rehabilitation therapies following brain injury. These therapies are wide-ranging, involving interventions of many different kinds. As a result, these therapies are hard to describe. As well as restricting actual practice, this is also a major impediment to evidence-based medicine as it is hard to meaningfully compare two treatment plans. Ontology development requires significant effort from both ontologists and domain experts. Knowledge elicited from domain experts forms the scope of the ontology. The proces…
Graz University of Technology(格拉茨工业大学);GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences(GESIS——莱布尼茨社会科学研究所);University of Koblenz-Landau(科布伦茨-兰道大学);Stanford University(斯坦福大学)
Biomedical taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies in the form of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as a taxonomy or the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus as an OWL-based ontology, play a critical role in acquiring, representing and processing information about human health. With increasing adoption and relevance, biomedical ontologies have also significantly increased in size. For example, the 11th revision of the ICD, which is currently under active development by the WHO contains nearly 50,000 classes representing a vast variety of different diseases and causes of death. This…
Ontology operations, e.g., aligning and merging, were studied and implemented extensively in different settings, such as, categorical operations, relation algebras, typed graph grammars, with different concerns. However, aligning and merging operations in the settings share some generic properties, e.g., idempotence, commutativity, associativity, and representativity, labeled by (I), (C), (A), and (R), respectively, which are defined on an ontology merging system $(\mathfrak{O},\sim,\merge)$, where $\mathfrak{O}$ is a set of the ontologies concerned, $\sim$ is a binary relation on $\mathfrak{O…
LaSIGE, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon(里斯本大学科学学院LaSIGE)
Ontology Matching aims to find a set of semantic correspondences, called an alignment, between related ontologies. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in efficient and effective matching methods for large ontologies. However, most of the alignments produced for large ontologies are logically incoherent. It was only recently that the use of repair techniques to improve the quality of ontology alignments has been explored. In this paper we present a novel technique for detecting incoherent concepts based on ontology modularization, and a new repair algorithm that minimizes the inc…
Yale University(耶鲁大学);University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学)
Much of biomedical and healthcare data is encoded in discrete, symbolic form such as text and medical codes. There is a wealth of expert-curated biomedical domain knowledge stored in knowledge bases and ontologies, but the lack of reliable methods for learning knowledge representation has limited their usefulness in machine learning applications. While text-based representation learning has significantly improved in recent years through advances in natural language processing, attempts to learn biomedical concept embeddings so far have been lacking. A recent family of models called knowledge g…
The relatively recent adoption of Knowledge Graphs as an enabling technology in multiple high-profile artificial intelligence and cognitive applications has led to growing interest in the Semantic Web technology stack. Many semantics-related tools, however, are focused on serving experts with a deep understanding of semantic technologies. For example, triplification of relational data is available but there is no open source tool that allows a user unfamiliar with OWL/RDF to import data into a semantic triple store in an intuitive manner. Further, many tools require users to have a working und…
In ontology-based data access (OBDA), ontologies have been successfully employed for querying possibly unstructured and incomplete data. In this paper, we advocate using ontologies not only to formulate queries and compute their answers, but also for modifying queries by relaxing or restraining them, so that they can retrieve either more or less answers over a given dataset. Towards this goal, we first illustrate that some domain knowledge that could be naturally leveraged in OBDA can be expressed using complex role inclusions (CRI). Queries over ontologies with CRI are not first-order (FO) re…
University of Pavia(帕维亚大学);Free University of Bozen-Bolzano(博尔扎诺自由大学)
A key challenge for Industry 4.0 applications is to develop control systems for automated manufacturing services that are capable of addressing both data integration and semantic interoperability issues, as well as monitoring and decision making tasks. To address such an issue in advanced manufacturing systems, principled knowledge representation approaches based on formal ontologies have been proposed as a foundation to information management and maintenance in presence of heterogeneous data sources. In addition, ontologies provide reasoning and querying capabilities to aid domain experts and…
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology(阿卜杜拉国王科技大学)
Many ontologies, in particular in the biomedical domain, are based on the Description Logic EL++. Several efforts have been made to interpret and exploit EL++ ontologies by distributed representation learning. Specifically, concepts within EL++ theories have been represented as n-balls within an n-dimensional embedding space. However, the intersectional closure is not satisfied when using n-balls to represent concepts because the intersection of two n-balls is not an n-ball. This leads to challenges when measuring the distance between concepts and inferring equivalence between concepts. To thi…
Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing(弗劳恩霍夫算法与科学计算研究所);University of Cologne(科隆大学)
Here we present a holistic approach for data exploration on dense knowledge graphs as a novel approach with a proof-of-concept in biomedical research. Knowledge graphs are increasingly becoming a vital factor in knowledge mining and discovery as they connect data using technologies from the semantic web. In this paper we extend a basic knowledge graph extracted from biomedical literature by context data like named entities and relations obtained by text mining and other linked data sources like ontologies and databases. We will present an overview about this novel network. The aim of this work…
Warsaw University of Technology(华沙理工大学);Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences(波兰科学院系统研究所);University of Craiova(克拉约瓦大学)
Reusing ontologies in practice is still very challenging, especially when multiple ontologies are (jointly) involved. Moreover, despite recent advances, the realization of systematic ontology quality assurance remains a difficult problem. In this work, the quality of thirty biomedical ontologies, and the Computer Science Ontology are investigated, from the perspective of a practical use case. Special scrutiny is given to cross-ontology references, which are vital for combining ontologies. Diverse methods to detect potential issues are proposed, including natural language processing and network…
Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation of Ontologies using Artificial Intelligence (DRAGON-AI)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校);The Jackson Laboratory(杰克逊实验室);University of Arizona(亚利桑那大学);Simon Fraser University(西蒙弗雷泽大学);The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine(杰克逊基因组医学实验室);University at Buffalo(布法罗大学);University of Florida(佛罗里达大学);Northwestern University(西北大学);SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics(SIB瑞士生物信息学研究所);Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室);University of São Paulo(圣保罗大学);University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus(科罗拉多大学安舒茨医学中心);Sanger Institute(桑格研究所);European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)(欧洲生物信息研究所(EMBL-EBI));Phoenix Bioinformatics(菲尼克斯生物信息学公司);Stowers Institute for Medical Research(斯托尔斯医学研究所);IC-FOODS;Rothamsted Research(洛桑研究所);National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences(国家推进转化科学中心);INRAE, French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment(法国国家农业、食品与环境研究院(INRAE));University of Cambridge(剑桥大学)
CENTRIA(里斯本新大学科学技术学院信息学系人工智能中心);Faculdade Ciências e Tecnologias Universidade Nova de Lisboa(里斯本新大学科学技术学院)
Ontologies and rules are usually loosely coupled in knowledge representation formalisms. In fact, ontologies use open-world reasoning while the leading semantics for rules use non-monotonic, closed-world reasoning. One exception is the tightly-coupled framework of Minimal Knowledge and Negation as Failure (MKNF), which allows statements about individuals to be jointly derived via entailment from an ontology and inferences from rules. Nonetheless, the practical usefulness of MKNF has not always been clear, although recent work has formalized a general resolution-based method for querying MKNF w…
Unifying biomedical knowledge in a modern multimodal graph
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School(哈佛医学院生物医学信息学系);Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford(牛津大学工程科学系);Edison Scientific Inc.(Edison科学公司);Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research, University of Oxford(牛津大学苏格兰研究中心);Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard(MIT与哈佛大学Broad研究所);Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Harvard University(哈佛大学自然与人工智能研究所);Harvard Data Science Initiative(哈佛大学数据科学计划)
DCC, U of Chile & IMFD Chile(智利大学计算机系与智利千年数据基金会);University of Bremen(不来梅大学);University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学)
In ontology-mediated querying, description logic (DL) ontologies are used to enrich incomplete data with domain knowledge which results in more complete answers to queries. However, the evaluation of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) over relational databases is computationally hard. This raises the question when OMQ evaluation is efficient, in the sense of being tractable in combined complexity or fixed-parameter tractable. We study this question for a range of ontology-mediated query languages based on several important and widely-used DLs, using unions of conjunctive queries as the actual qu…
Effective debugging of ontologies is an important prerequisite for their broad application, especially in areas that rely on everyday users to create and maintain knowledge bases, such as the Semantic Web. In such systems ontologies capture formalized vocabularies of terms shared by its users. However in many cases users have different local views of the domain, i.e. of the context in which a given term is used. Inappropriate usage of terms together with natural complications when formulating and understanding logical descriptions may result in faulty ontologies. Recent ontology debugging appr…
Computational Bioscience Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology(阿卜杜拉国王科技大学计算生物科学研究中心)
We propose the Onto2Vec method, an approach to learn feature vectors for biological entities based on their annotations to biomedical ontologies. Our method can be applied to a wide range of bioinformatics research problems such as similarity-based prediction of interactions between proteins, classification of interaction types using supervised learning, or clustering.
The Description Logic EL has recently drawn considerable attention since, on the one hand, important inference problems such as the subsumption problem are polynomial. On the other hand, EL is used to define large biomedical ontologies. Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The main result of this paper is that unification in EL is decidable. More precisely, EL-unification is NP-complete, and thus has the same complexity as EL-matching. We also show that, w.r.t. the unification type,…
GraphPrompt: Graph-Based Prompt Templates for Biomedical Synonym Prediction
University of Washington(华盛顿大学);Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence(穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学);Nanyang Technological University(南洋理工大学);Peking University(北京大学)
Enabling Transparent Cyber Threat Intelligence Combining Large Language Models and Domain Ontologies
Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Italy(布雷西亚大学信息工程系);School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, United Kingdom(卡迪夫大学计算机科学与信息学学院);Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, United Kingdom(南安普顿大学电子与计算机科学系)
RWTH Aachen University(亚琛工业大学);Fraunhofer FIT(弗劳恩霍夫应用信息技术研究所);ZBMED - Information Center for Life Sciences(ZB MED——生命科学信息中心);University of Cologne(科隆大学)
Structured and unstructured data and facts about drugs, genes, protein, viruses, and their mechanism are spread across a huge number of scientific articles. These articles are a large-scale knowledge source and can have a huge impact on disseminating knowledge about the mechanisms of certain biological processes. A domain-specific knowledge graph~(KG) is an explicit conceptualization of a specific subject-matter domain represented w.r.t semantically interrelated entities and relations. A KG can be constructed by integrating such facts and data and be used for data integration, exploration, and…
Debugging of ontologies is an important prerequisite for their wide-spread application, especially in areas that rely upon everyday users to create and maintain knowledge bases, as in the case of the Semantic Web. Recent approaches use diagnosis methods to identify causes of inconsistent or incoherent ontologies. However, in most debugging scenarios these methods return many alternative diagnoses, thus placing the burden of fault localization on the user. This paper demonstrates how the target diagnosis can be identified by performing a sequence of observations, that is, by querying an oracle …
Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE) have become a quite popular class of models specifically devised to deal with ontologies and graph structure data, as they can implicitly encode statistical dependencies between entities and relations in a latent space. KGE techniques are particularly effective for the biomedical domain, where it is quite common to deal with large knowledge graphs underlying complex interactions between biological and chemical objects. Recently in the literature, the PharmKG dataset has been proposed as one of the most challenging knowledge graph biomedical benchmark, with hund…
Biomedical knowledge graphs (KG) are heterogenous networks consisting of biological entities as nodes and relations between them as edges. These entities and relations are extracted from millions of research papers and unified in a single resource. The goal of biomedical multi-hop question-answering over knowledge graph (KGQA) is to help biologist and scientist to get valuable insights by asking questions in natural language. Relevant answers can be found by first understanding the question and then querying the KG for right set of nodes and relationships to arrive at an answer. To model the q…
A semantic approach to mapping the Provenance Ontology to Basic Formal Ontology
National Center for Ontological Research(国家本体论研究中心);Conceptual Systems(概念系统公司);University at Buffalo(布法罗大学);Summit Knowledge Solutions(顶峰知识解决方案公司);University of Vienna(维也纳大学);Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science(人工智能与数据科学研究所)
National Center for Ontological Research(国家本体研究中心);University at Buffalo, State University of New York(纽约州立大学布法罗分校);KadSci LLC(卡德科学有限责任公司);CUBRC, Inc.(CUBRC公司);University of Michigan-Ann Arbor(密歇根大学安娜堡分校)
The ever-increasing amount of data in biomedical research, and in cancer research in particular, needs to be managed to support efficient data access, exchange and integration. Existing software infrastructures, such caGrid, support access to distributed information annotated with a domain ontology. However, caGrid's current querying functionality depends on the structure of individual data resources without exploiting the semantic annotations. In this paper, we present the design and development of an ontology-based querying functionality that consists of: the generation of OWL2 ontologies fr…
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus(科罗拉多大学安舒茨医学校区);Columbia University Irving Medical Center(哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心);National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health(美国国立卫生研究院国家人类基因组研究所);Georgia State University(佐治亚州立大学);University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine(匹兹堡大学医学院);Università degli Studi di Milano(米兰大学);Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室);The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine(杰克逊基因组医学实验室);University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine(科罗拉多大学安舒茨医学院);Semanticly(Semanticly公司);Yale School of Medicine(耶鲁大学医学院);HealthLinc(HealthLinc健康中心);University of Pittsburgh(匹兹堡大学);Tufts University(塔夫茨大学);Sema4(Sema4公司);Janssen Research and Development(杨森研发)
Background: Common data models solve many challenges of standardizing electronic health record (EHR) data, but are unable to semantically integrate all the resources needed for deep phenotyping. Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies provide computable representations of biological knowledge and enable the integration of heterogeneous data. However, mapping EHR data to OBO ontologies requires significant manual curation and domain expertise. Objective: We introduce OMOP2OBO, an algorithm for mapping Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to OBO…
DeepEvidence: Empowering Biomedical Discovery with Deep Knowledge Graph Research
Keiji AI;Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University(大阪大学科学工业研究所);Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University(京都大学化学研究所生物信息中心);Division of Intramural Research, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health(国家卫生研究院生物医学图书馆内部研究部);Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine(韦尔·科恩医学中心流行病学与健康科学系);School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign(伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校计算机与数据科学学院)
Requirement volatility is an issue in software engineering in general, and in Web-based clinical applications in particular, which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. With advances in the health science, many features and functionalities need to be added to, or removed from, existing software applications in the biomedical domain. At the same time, the increasing complexity of biomedical systems makes them more difficult to understand, and consequently it is more difficult to define their requirements, which contributes considerably to their volatility. In …