Development of rheumatoid ontology

Abstract

The semantic representation of different medical information enables the medical information system to understand the meaning of medical terms. Ontology is used as a semantic representation technique that organizes and represents the semantic relations between the medical terms. Rheumatoid disease is one of the common autoimmune diseases; it has several clinical findings and several treatments to control its activity. This paper presents a new ontology building methodology that enables the ontology engineer to represent all types of knowledge and the intervention of experts from earlier stages. In addition, the paper presents the development of rheumatoid ontology that covers the major clinical aspects of the disease.