A Methodology for Defining Working Healthcare Ontologies

Retrieving the information needed for right clinical decision and searching through a large amount of data are important challenges that health information systems encountered despite the advances in the information systems. In order to reuse these distributed data, the health information standards are developed to enable interoperable health information systems. As the standards are far from the necessary semantics, the data defined according to these standards are not been efficiently used by machines. Semantic Web technologies provide a common framework to access and process the information by machines with the support of ontologies. The heterogeneous and distributed nature of health data makes it a very suitable candidate to define health domain specific ontologies. In this work, a methodology for defining health ontologies, which should work as information base of a health information system as the next stage, is proposed to ensure interoperability and reuse between health information systems with the support of health information standards. Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory Ontology (CBLO) is given as a use case to model information of laboratory tests realized in clinical biochemistry laboratory that are a sub-domain of medical laboratory tests. In addition, a weighted evaluation for the proposed methodology is presented. Keywords : Healthcare ontologies, Ontology, Methodology, Semantic Web, Interoperability, Health Information Standards, Knowledge Representation. DOI : 10.7176/JSTR/5-4-15