Health ontology system

Abstract

Most healthcare institutions such as hospitals and clinics store their data in the form of databases of various formats. The Health Ontology System that we have developed provides a means to integrate these data with concepts and semantics in the form of a shared cumulative ontology for enabling machines to interpret them. This involves three major software tools, namely, Ontology Generator, Ontology Distiller and Ontology Accumulator. The Ontology Generator is used to create an ontology from a selected database using metadata provided by its database management system. In a reverse process, the Ontology Distiller enables a subset of data from an ontology to be distilled into a database for further analysis. The Ontology Accumulator integrates some similar types of ontology to be accumulated in the cumulative ontology. This Integrated Health Ontology System will pave the way for integrating existing data with ontologies that will be useful for developing semantic agents for healthcare domain.