BUILDING A CORE BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY ON DISEASES, BODY PARTS, SYMPTOMS AND ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, NUTRITIONAL AND DIAGNOSTIC FACTORS OF DISEASES

Abstract

Considering today’s surge of information, the need for well organized knowledge bases is increasing rapidly for providing simplified access to knowledge and its further processing. In biomedical domain, heaps of information is buried in scientific publications and online forums. This calls for representing this information in a more expressive semantic way by determining and storing relational information into a machine readable form. So, the primary goal of this research endeavor has been to build a knowledge base on entities and relations containing amass of formalized background knowledge suitable for supporting reasoning in biomedical domain. In this work, we introduce a way for easily accessing the knowledge about body parts and symptoms of human diseases, along with environmental, social, nutritional and diagnostic factors that cause these diseases. The information for this knowledge base is extracted from the controlled vocabulary thesaurus “Medical Subject Headings” (MeSH), which is published by National Library of Medicine. The result is a semantic graph of typed entities and relations between diseases, their symptoms, affected body parts and determining factors, with emphasis on environmental, social, nutritional and diagnostic factors. The facts stored in our ontology are provided to the user in a visual web interface. Currently, our ontology contains 53020 individuals, 96835 synonymous terms and 197731 facts related to seven pre-defined categories of our biomedical ontology. In this way, it fulfils an identified need to provide detailed semantic knowledge regarding different biomedical sub-domains at one place through one core KB