LexRDF model: An RDF-based unified model for heterogeneous biomedical ontologies

The Lexical Grid (LexGrid) project is an on-going community-driven initiative coordinated by the Mayo Clinic Division of Biomedical Statistics and Informatics (BSI). It provides a common terminology model to represent multiple vocabulary and ontology sources as well as a scalable and robust API for accessing such information. While successfully used and adopted in the biomedical and clinical community, an important requirement is to align the existing LexGrid model with emerging Semantic Web standards and specifications. This paper introduces the LexRDF model, which maps the LexGrid model elements to corresponding constructs in W3C specifications such as RDF, OWL, and SKOS. Our mapping specification successfully used W3C standards to represent most of the existing LexGrid components, and those that did not map point out issues in the existing specifications that the W3C may want to consider in future work. With LexRDF, the terminological information represented in LexGrid can be translated to RDF triples, and therefore allowing LexGrid to leverage standard tools and technologies such as SPARQL and RDF triple stores.