Building and reusing medical ontology for tropical diseases management

Abstract

Currently, the use of ontologies in medicine is mainly focused on the representation and re-organization of medical terminologies. Moreover, there are only a small number of ontologies available in the domain of tropical diseases. Therefore, it is important to build and reuse medical ontology for tropical diseases management, which behaves as an information support system to represent the information related to tropical diseases in a uniform and organized manner. The building process of ontology in tropical diseases domain is fully described in this paper and has been implemented online using Protégé 4.1 and OWL DL syntaxes. In order to provide easy access to user, ontology browser was used as visualization tool. Functional testing of ontology has been done with involving medical data collected from faculty of tropical medicine, Mahidol University. Test result shows that the developed ontology is able to provide structured information about tropical diseases that are very useful for healthcare professionals. Since it is an online system, it can be accessed by the user anytime, anywhere and offer support for a better medical decision and indirectly helping in the management of tropical diseases.