Open Reconcile: A Practical Open-sourced Ontology-driven Webservice

Curators in specialized fields such as biotechnology, often have to either rely on in-house tools or do tedious tasks manually. To address these issues, we have implemented Open Reconcile, an open-source and general reconciliation tool that ensures the compliance of a dataset to a specific controlled vocabulary. Open Reconcile is compatible with the Google Refine Reconciliation API, where Google Refine is a tool for data analysis. Open Reconcile is highly customizable and supports data from different database applications. It adopts multiple strategies to find the optimal match to reconcile input terms with those in a controlled vocabulary. It also allows users to configure a synonym table to facilitate auto-corrections that can only be performed with the support of domain expertise.