Representing different views of acupuncture in a single ontology.

Abstract

A major challenge for health informatics is to model the health-care domain knowledge into appropriate and useful ontologies. This is difficult, and modellers tend to simplify things dramatically by ignoring the fact that the health care domain encompasses a global perspective. The influx of complementary and alternative medicines from the East to the West, or indeed the ongoing colonialization of orthodox Western medicine into other non-western traditions requires multiple paradigms of delivering treatment to be considered simultaneously, side by side. Models and specifications need to be developed to encompass this richness and represent this complex reality so as to understand what the different concepts and terms in each tradition achieve. Acupuncture is used as a test case of cross-membership between two different paradigms. Here, we briefly outline requirements and answer possible objections to our approach before illustrating how we have modelled heterogeneous domain knowledge from different cultures, and across different paradigms, within a single ontology.