Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Ontology is a formal explicit description of concepts in the knowledge domain. In recent \nyears, developing ontology in different domains is a hot topic for many researchers, especially in \nthe medical field because of the benefits offered to users. Using ontology allows sharing and \nreusing domain knowledge in an efficient and explicit way. In particular, ontology in medical \nfield can facilitate the access to query data, precise knowledge, and seamless sharing of \nelectronic medical records (EMR). Thus ontology increases the accuracy of doctor?s diagnostic \ndecision. \nAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often presents with difficulties in verbal and nonverbal \ncommunication, behavior and social interactions. Autism is difficult to define due to the \ncomplex heterogeneous disorders in this domain and to the lack of coherent set of knowledge \nthat deals with all aspects of autism. The purpose of this research was to address these \nshortcomings by developing a comprehensive ASD ontology that formally conceptualizes both \ndomain and operational autism knowledge, unifies autism terminology, and facilitates access to \nprecise autistic information for both general public and expert users, thus enabling better \ndiagnostic and treatment decisions. \nTo build such ontology, we investigated many medical research works in the various \nareas of autism such as disorders, effects and treatments of ASD. The study was done with the \npurpose of extracting and gathering information from the most trusted sources such as existing \nontologies, standard textbooks, relevant articles and clinical studies. These sources were used to \nbuild a semantic map linking key concept classes. Mainly we focused on properties and \nrelationships between these classes to formally describe the autistic domain and operational \nknowledge and to bring the scattered knowledge into the ontological form. Ontology \ninstantiation for each subclass was based on pilot studies and clinical cases. \nThe system was implemented using Prot?g?, an ontological framework developed by the \nStanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research at the Stanford University. The ontology \nwas built using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is a semantic web language designed \nto indicate the rich and complex knowledge of the domain. Moreover, we developed a basic web \nquery system for the ASD ontology to present the ontology information to different users around \nthe world. The developed system has been evaluated to measure quality of embedded \nknowledge, ontology correctness and the usability of its web query system.
Author: Janatimasaoom, Babak
Institution: Lakehead University
Language: English
Subfield: Health Informatics
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2960837345