An ontology network for Diabetes Mellitus in Mexico.

Journal: Journal of biomedical semantics
PMID:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Medical experts in the domain of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) acquire specific knowledge from diabetic patients through monitoring and interaction. This allows them to know the disease and information about other conditions or comorbidities, treatments, and typical consequences of the Mexican population. This indicates that an expert in a domain knows technical information about the domain and contextual factors that interact with it in the real world, contributing to new knowledge generation. For capturing and managing information about the DM, it is necessary to design and implement techniques and methods that allow: determining the most relevant conceptual dimensions and their correct organization, the integration of existing medical and clinical information from different resources, and the generation of structures that represent the deduction process of the doctor. An Ontology Network is a collection of ontologies of diverse knowledge domains which can be interconnected by meta-relations. This article describes an Ontology Network for representing DM in Mexico, designed by a proposed methodology. The information used for Ontology Network building include the ontological resource reuse and non-ontological resource transformation for ontology design and ontology extending by natural language processing techniques. These are medical information extracted from vocabularies, taxonomies, medical dictionaries, ontologies, among others. Additionally, a set of semantic rules has been defined within the Ontology Network to derive new knowledge.

Authors

  • Cecilia Reyes-Peña
    Faculty of Computer Science, Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Av. San Claudio, Puebla, Mexico. reyesp.cecilia@gmail.com.
  • Mireya Tovar
    Faculty of Computer Science, Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Av. San Claudio, Puebla, Mexico.
  • Maricela Bravo
    Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Av. San Pablo No. 180, Mexico City, Mexico.
  • Regina Motz
    Universidad de la Republica, Julio Herrera y Reissig 565, Montevideo, Uruguay.