Using an Ontology-Based Approach to Handle Author Affiliations in a Large Biomedical Citation Database.

To handle differences in affiliation names submitted with biomedical journal articles, we build an affiliation knowledge base named Authority File for Affiliations (AFA) based on ontology principles. There are currently 113,700 affiliation concepts with about 583,700 affiliation names. The AFA becomes an essential tool in managing citation information and data analysis.