Study On Constructing And Retrieval Of Medical Ontology

Ontology originated in philosophy. Ontology described objectly about"being"in the world. Since 1990s, ontology has been introduced in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Engineering and Library & Information Sciences. In the domains mentioned, ontology is a system of knowledge organization. Ontology represented and organized knowledge by the describation of the concept and the relation between concepts of a special domain. Ontology learning and practicing have been developing rapidly these years. In these fields the research level of ontology in China is not as developed as the western countries now. There is still no domain-orientied tentative or demo system based on ontology in Library & Information fields in China.The state of ontology research in China and foreign countries has been introduced in this dissertation. The ontological theory and method have been described. In order to validate the possibility of constructing ontology-based knowledge organization, a heart valve disease ontology model has been firstly built in China with"seven steps"method and Protégé. The ontology represented the domain knowledge of heart valve disease by constructing the inheritance, constraint and instance relation between concepts. In the procedure of constructing ontology the adaption of ontology editor has been validated, the process of constructing ontology has been clarified. The heart valve disease ontology can ben used as paradigms in medicine.On the basis of heart valve disease ontology, inqueries to the ontology with ProtégéAxiom Language has been made preliminarily. During searching, the retrieval based-on ontology avoided mere"word-to-word"mate within traditional database and achieved concept retrieval. In the same time the retrieval increased accuracy, answered the questions and reach an intelligent retrieval degree.The significance of this dissertation is the introducing of ontology theory and methods in medical library and information fields in China. The role of this dissertation is hoped to propel the ontology methods forward in the fields of medical information retrieval, medical specialist system, medical teaching system and natural language comprehension.