Abstract:
The target of this research is creating a biomedical ontology for liver diseases using
UMLS as data source. Due to extensive available information in the biomedical domain its
unstructured format makes the access of that data to users difficult. Development in biomedical
domain lies within its publications that is its literature. Ontologies help create structured
knowledge base of the available information for easy access and use. In the recent years,
ontology development has extended to desktops of experts from artificial intelligence.
Ontologies now are common over the internet ranging from “Yahoo!” to “Amazon”. Resource
description framework is developed by the WWW consortium to make the knowledge
machine-readable. Protégé is tool developed by Stanford university to create and edit
ontologies. It uses RDF triplets to model the schemas of an ontology by linking the concepts
their properties and relations to concepts. The disease ontology is created using UMLS as data
source.
Existing biomedical ontologies focus either on diseases and its hierarchy or symptoms
only. No existing ontology draws the link between diseases and its symptoms. The existing
ontologies has structured vocabulary like SNOWMED or has a semantic network like UMLS.
The ontology created in this research focuses on liver diseases with hierarchy of the diseases
and its semantic network based on UMLS concepts whereas the symptoms are based on the
ontology created by Institute of Genome Sciences namely, “Symptom ontology”.
The relation between diseases and its respective symptoms are evaluated with the help
of experts and expressed in graphical representation.
