Ontology Development

Summary

The IDMP-O release 1.0 is the first production-ready version. It covers many different use cases around substance identification, medicinal products and pharmaceutical products.

Over the last quarter, since the 0.5.0 release, the development team has focused on:

1. better coverage of the ISO 11238 Substances content.
2. better coverage of the ISO 11615 Medicinal Products content.
3. extending and improving examples to demonstrate how to use the ontologies in real-world applications.

We have also worked towards increased usability and flexibility, and augmented these two ontologies with additional metadata to improve understandability. Details, including additional references and the degree to which a given element complies with the ISO standard(s), were also added. 

In addition to adding new content, we have taken advantage of revisions to the OMG Commons Ontology Library v1.1 updates. Four additional ontologies have been added as formal standards at OMG, which are now dereferenceable from the OMG website. They include the Documents, Parties and Situations, Roles and Compositions, and Quantities and Units ontologies that IDMP-O depends on. We anticipate publication of another update to the Commons Library, including the other 5 ontologies that our main ISO standard ontologies depend on in mid-2024. See https://www.omg.org/spec/Commons/ for more information.

Also, in order to demonstrate how to extend labeling details as required by the ISO IDMP standards with tables or other rich document content, we've integrated a new family of ontologies from the library science community called the "SPAR Ontologies", or Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies (see http://www.sparontologies.net/ and https://github.com/sparontologies for more information). These ontologies include a few issues which we are working with their development team to resolve, and are only used in examples as a consequence. Together with a new DocumentComponents ontology in IDMP, they address challenges for IDMP based regulatory reporting related to linking content embedded in documents, including rich tables, which are referenced as string values in the IDMP ISO documents. These are described under the quantitative view, below, among the 7 new ontologies listed. They are also described in examples at Pattern: Citing and linking into reference documents - REVIEW.

We removed one starting point example which may be reintegrated over the coming months if it is needed. It did not show enough new content to warrant integration in the 1.0 release.

Quantitative View

One ontology was deleted:

1. CellCeptExample – incomplete example that may be added back later this year

7 new ontologies were added:

1. c40 – Citation Counting and Context Characterisation Ontology (C4O)
2. datacite – covers the DataCite Metadata Schema Specification for citations
3. deo – Discourse Elements Ontology (DEO)
4. doco – Document Components Ontology (DoCo)
5. frbr – Essential FRBR in OWL2 DL Ontology (FRBR), which corresponds to the IFLA report on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)
6. po – Pattern Ontology (PO)
7. DocumentComponents – an extension to the SPAR ontologies primarily focused on table content 

Except for the last one, all of them are SPAR ontologies.

The following ontologies were revised and/or extended:

Detailed View

In order to see the differences in axioms use the GitHub release comparison or IDMP viewer 'Compare versions' functionality:

See below an example of some differences in the description of idmp-sub:Substance