Semantic Search in Ontologies

November 15, 2011 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Semantic Search in Ontologies

One of the important components of many bioinformatic algorithms are semantic similarity searches in ontologies. There are, unfortunately, no algorithms for computing the exact distribution of semantic similarity scores.

This interesting information was found on 7th Space Interactive in their article, “Exact score distribution computation for ontological similarity searches.” A new algorithm that proposes a collapsed subgraph of the ontology graph and thereby allowing fastscore distribution computation. The new algorithm is also quite a bit faster than the naive approach. The approach is applicable to any ontology that the annotation-propagation rule holds and can improve any bioinformatic method that makes only use of the raw similarity scores. Sounds complicated, but it is nice to see semantic search growing in use.

Melody K. Smith

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.