A Domain Specific Ontology Authoring Environment for a Clinical Documentation System

Abstract

We present a domain specific ontology editor for viewing, updating and managing a clinical documentation knowledge base. The editor is designed to allow clinical content specialists, who do not have a working knowledge of OWL, Semantic Web technologies or knowledge engineering, to quickly generate ontologies that describe clinical documentation templates along with rich bi-directional mappings between these documentation template ontologies and biomedical domain ontologies. While the editor has been designed and implemented for a specific use-case, many of the novel design choices are applicable to more traditional ontology editing environments. Furthermore, we believe that the workflow that is promoted by the editing environment and the partitioning and arrangement of the ontologies that are compiled by the editor are applicable to more general scenarios where two sets of ontologies corresponding to different application sub-domains need to be edited side-by-side and mapped between using a set of binding ontologies.