Design and Development of a Biocultural Ontology for Personalized Diabetes Self-Management of American Indians

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and development of an ontology model to assist personalized self-management for American Indian diabetes users. The most important part of this ontology is a biocultural user profile modeling that presents various characteristics of American Indian users. We describe the overall ontology development life cycle including six well defined development stages that were employed by ontology engineers and developers to plan for, design, implement, evaluate, and deliver ontology. The ontology development process is iterative, as each phase can be cyclically and incrementally repeated. The proposed ontology has been evaluated with different approaches, standards, and use case scenarios. The ontology is ready to be used as a knowledge base for semantically intelligent personalized diabetes self-management for American Indians.