TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) telemedicine with enterprise ontology support - a form of consensus-certified collective human intelligence

Abstract

We propose the novel enterprise ontology-driven information system (IS) development (EOD-ISD) approach to automate the construction and customization of telemedicine systems. The system builder simply constructs the meta-interface (MI) specification, which is made up of icons selected from the icon library. With the MI, the EOD-ISD generator uses the enterprise ontology as the master and basis to automatically generate the target system. The enterprise ontology is a form of consensus-certified collective human intelligence with explicit semantics. In the context of our research the enterprise ontology is locally owned by the establishment that has isolated the desired subset from the global ontology of the relevant knowledge domain (e.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine). From the enterprise ontology, which serves as the standard vocabulary for the establishment, different local systems can be customized anytime and anywhere simply with the MI specifications provided. The EOD-ISD approach was verified successfully with different TCM telemedicine diagnostic/prescription (D/P) system prototypes, customized from the proprietary enterprise TCM ontology core (TCM onto-core) of the Nong's Company Ltd.