Geri Steve

An overview of the ONIONS project: applying ontologies to the integration of medical terminologies

Abstract The paper presents a review of the ONIONS project. ONIONS is committed to developing a large-scale, axiomatized ontology library for medical terminology. The developed methodology exploits a description logic-based design for the modules in the library and makes extended use of generic theories, thus creating a stratification of the modules. Terminological knowledge is acquired by conceptual analysis and ontology integration over a set of authoritative sources. After addressing general issues about conceptual analysis and integration, the methodology is briefly described. The central part of the paper presents the investigation we have made on the 476,000 medical concepts singled out by the National Library of Medicine as the MetathesaurusTM in the UMLS project. This is followed by several case studies concerning lexical polysemy, the interface between ontologies. A section describing the current structure of the library and the generic theories reused is provided. Current results of our research include the integration of some top-level ontologies in the ON9.2 ontology library, and the formalization of the terminological knowledge in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

Some Ontological Tools to Support Legal Regulatory Compliance, with a Case Study

The increasing development of legal ontologies seems to offer satisfactory solutions to legal knowledge formalization, which in past experiences lead to a limited exploitation of legal expert systems for practical and commercial use. The paper describes some ontology-based tools that enable legal knowledge formalization. Jurwordnet is an extension to the legal domain of the Italian version of EuroWordNet. It is a content description model for legal information and a lexical resource for accessing multilingual and heterogeneous information sources. Its concepts are organised according to a “Core Legal Ontology” (CLO), based on DOLCE+, an extension of the DOLCE foundational ontology. Jurwordnet and CLO are also used to represent the assessment of legal regulatory compliance across different legal systems or between norms and cases. An example is discussed concerning compliance between EC directives and national legislations.

A Medical Ontology Library That Integrates the UMLS MetathesaurusTM

Paper-based terminology systems cannot satisfy anymore the new desiderata of healthcare information systems: the demand for re-use and sharing of patient data, their transmission and the need of semantic-based criteria for purposive statistical aggregation. The unambiguous communication of complex and detailed medical concepts is now a crucial feature of medical information systems. Ontologies can support a more effective data and knowledge sharing in medicine. In this paper we survey the ontological analysis performed on the top-levels of some important medical terminology systems (an outcome of the ONIONS methodology) and we sketch out the ontological analysis performed on the UMLS Metathesaurus™. We show the convenience of an ontological approach in dealing with the different conceptualizations behind medical terminologies and the polysemy of terms. The multiple classification in UMLS is shown to be a phenomenon of polysemy and not one of multiple subsumption.

The Role of Ontologies for an Effective and Unambiguous Dissemination of Clinical Guidelines

Guidelines for clinical practice are being introduced in an extensive way in more and more different fields of medicine They have the potential to improve the quality and cost-efficiency of care in a complex health care delivery environment. Computerization may increase the effectiveness of both the information retrieval of guidelines and the management of guideline-based care. The scenario is evolving from stand-alone workstations to telematics applications that enable guidelines development and dissemination. However, such a knowledge sharing requires the definition of formal models for guidelines representation. The models should have a clear semantics in order to avoid ambiguities. The role of ontologies is that of making explicit the conceptualizations behind a model. In this paper we present our library of generic and domain ontologies and point out its role for integrating existing guideline models and defining standard representations. In particular, we stress the distinction -often collapsed within existing guideline models- between the conceptualization of actual procedures, the conceptualization of planning, and the conceptualization behind the diagrammatic representation of plans.