A pragmatic approach to mapping the open biomedical ontologies.

There has been a large increase in the number of ontologies that have been introduced by the biomedical community in recent years. To maximise their potential, there is an urgent need for a mechanism to build interoperability between ontologies developed by different groups. While identifying and linking related concepts is of obvious importance, it is also essential to analyse how ontologies as a whole overlap and can be clustered. This paper explores overlapping relationships in the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) and provides an interoperability framework called InterOBO for sharing biomedical knowledge across OBO communities.