۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ The Proposed Ontology Maintenance System

۳٫ The System Evaluation

۴٫ Conclusions

References

The constructed medical ontologies need to be updated in order to reflect the changes occurred on the medicine such as the clinical findings, treatments and their side effects. Various researchers defined the ontology maintenance as the process of updating the ontology or the evolution of the ontology. Other researches consider the ontology maintenance as a composed process that involves the ontology evolution and pruning. This paper presents a Rheumatoid ontology maintenance system that incorporates both of the ontology evolution and the ontology pruning. The evolution is executed in a way that ensures the ontology consistency and its relevance to the domain of interest.

Introduction

The large medical datasets cannot be easily interpreted; they need an intelligent technique to obtain the inferred knowledge. Ontology is used in the medical domain for the semantic knowledge representation that enables the intelligent agents and intelligent computer systems to understand the data and discover new knowledge. Ontologies can be used in Decision Support Systems (DSS) 1,2,3,4, medical data integration 5,6,7 and knowledge management 8, 9 . Shaban-Nejad and Haarslev 10 have defined the notion of ontology maintenance as the changes that are occurred on the ontology. Luczak-Rösch11 assumes that the ontology maintenance concerns about the evolution of ontologies that are used in an application. DoingHarris et al 12 consider the ontology maintenance as the process of expansion of current ontology. They assume that the ontology maintenance is the variant of ontology evolution notion. Maedche and Volz 13 have defined the ontology maintenance as a composed process that involves two sub processes; the ontology evolution and the ontology pruning.