Ontology: A Case for Disease and Drug Knowledge Discovery

A number of medical conditions are still incurable today, some are even auto-immune. When people come down with disease conditions like lupus, Alzheimer, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, diabetes, cancer, asthma, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, AIDS and a host of others, they become incapacitated, lose major functions and most just wait until they die. These conditions are usually very cruel to those who suffer them. The lack of cure for these conditions is partly due to the fact that their causative agents are not clearly known or understood. One might be tempted to presume that with the completion of the Human Genome Project, solutions would have been derived for such disease conditions. It is only wise to think that such conditions have so far remained major challenges to medical researchers because they have multiple causes. Ontology, a widely accepted Knowledge Representation (KR) paradigm is therefore proposed as a KR technique to holistically attempt to address the gaps by first identifying all the causative elements, and then being able to proffer viable solutions to such conditions.