Semantic reasoning with XML-based biomedical information models.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is increasingly being used for biomedical data exchange. The parallel growth in the use of ontologies in biomedicine presents opportunities for combining the two technologies to leverage the semantic reasoning services provided by ontology-based tools. There are currently no standardized approaches for taking XML-encoded biomedical information models and representing and reasoning with them using ontologies. To address this shortcoming, we have developed a workflow and a suite of tools for transforming XML-based information models into domain ontologies encoded using OWL. In this study, we applied semantics reasoning methods to these ontologies to automatically generate domain-level inferences. We successfully used these methods to develop semantic reasoning methods for information models in the HIV and radiological image domains.