Patent ID: 7505989

Claim:
A computer-implemented system for creating one or more customized ontologies from a master ontology, the system comprising: a master ontology including a plurality of individual assertions, wherein an assertion comprises a first concept, a second concept, and a relationship between the first concept and the second concept, wherein at least one concept in a first assertion of the plurality of individual assertions is a concept in at least a second assertion of the plurality of individual assertions, and wherein one or more relationships in the plurality of individual assertions comprise relationships unconstrained by any hierarchical arrangement of concepts; a set of master data sources from which the plurality of individual assertions of the master ontology are derived, each master data source associated with an origin tag indicating its origin; and at least one processor and a memory, the memory including instructions that cause the processor to: apply one or more customizing constraints to the plurality of individual assertions of the master ontology to produce a customized set of individual assertions from the plurality of assertions of the master ontology, wherein the one or more customizing constraints include: (i) an exclusion list of master data sources that are selected for exclusion from the customized set of individual assertions such that none of the individual assertions in the customized set include assertions from the plurality of individual assertions of the master ontology derived from the master data sources on the exclusion list, wherein each master data source in the exclusion list is listed along with its origin tag, and (ii) a list of additional data sources not in the set of master data sources to be utilized in the custom ontology, wherein one or more individual assertions derived from the list of additional data sources are included in the customized set of individual assertions, remove individual assertions derived from the excluded master data sources from a copy of the plurality of individual assertions of the master ontology, extract additional individual assertions from the additional data sources, confirm the validity of the information contained in additional assertions, add the additional individual assertions to the copy of the plurality of individual assertions after the individual assertions derived from the excluded master data sources have been removed, to form the customized set of individual assertions, and store the customized set of individual assertions in a data storage device as a custom ontology.