Developing an Ontology on Cerebral Aneurysms within the EUproject @neurIST University Hospital Freiburg – Medical Informatics Department, http://www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/medinf
Overview 1. Overview Summary
• Challenge: Develop an ontology covering the broad range of research on and clinical management of cerebral aneurysms. Integrate the different views of e.g. clinicians or epidemiologists into one model. The ontology will be used by project partners as basis for developing semantic mediation tools (for e.g. connecting databases) and tools for visualizing/interfacing the different domain aspects/views in intuitive fashion (e.g. automatically adapting editors for clinicians). • Solution: Create an ontology to solve the given task. • Why a semantic solution? “Experiment“ whether this solution can really improve semantic mediation and the autmatic creation of visualizations/interfaces • Key Expected Benefits: Simplified development of semantic mediation tools, simplified creation of visualization/interface tools • Business partners: Several domain partners (i.e. hospitals) that provide us with input from experts in the aneurysm domain for correct modelling. Other partners developing the semantic mediation software based upon the ontology. • Sector: HCLS – clinical (patient) and biomedical research environment
Keys components
• • Existing software: Protégé 3.3.1/4-alpha as editors, Pellet 1.5 as reasoner Research and development: Technology locks: the size/complexity of the ontology seems to become problematic for the reasoner in the near future – so the classification of the ontology cannot be done “on-the-fly”
2. Current Practices and Technologies
• Review of the existing systems • In house technology: development of an easy to use web-based ontology browser for clinicians and researchers (Protégé to complex for domain experts that just want to have a quick look on the ontology) • Usage of OWL or OWL1.1: o small, well constrained example illustrating a particular useful feature of OWL(1.1): not yet possible because of contractual restrictions within the project o ontology URL: not yet publicly available (see above) o language (OWL1.0 /OWL1.1) and expressiveness currently used (DL-Lite, SHIQ, EL++ etc. -- see http://www.webont.org/owl/1.1/tractable.html): We use pure OWL-DL but are planning to include 1.1 features in the future.
3. Requirements
• • System requirements OWL requirements o key requirements not met by OWL or OWL 1.1, but essential for the use-case: of course, relations of higher arity would be nice ☺ - besides that we currently are satisfied with current OWL regarding our needs o small, well constrained example illustrating why a particular feature of OWL 1.0 or OWL 1.1 would be useful and expected benefits o most critical extensions needed/recommended e.g; constraints, keys, CWA, rules
4. Support
• Support required for OWL ontology/application development (e.g; mailing list for OWL users, wiki including various information on tools/software, more intelligent information system etc.): We are providing the adaptors of the ontology with personal e-mail and f2f discussions/support. We also have added Wiki-entries to the Aneurist-Wiki for domain experts on how they can look at/eplore the ontology.
5. Conclusion References
Susanne Hanser, Martin Boeker, Kai Kumpf, Philipp Bijlenga, Stefan Schulz. Design of an Ontology on Cerebral Aneurysms: Representing the Conceptual Space of the @neurIST Project. Medinfo 2007 Congress, 20-24 August 2007, Brisbane, Australia. Martin Boeker, Holger Stenzhorn, Kai Kumpf, Philippe Bijlenga, Stefan Schulz und Susanne Hanser The @neurIST Ontology of Intracranial Aneurysms: Providing Terminological Services for an Integrated IT Infrastructure (to appear) in Proceedings of the AMIA 2007 Annual Symposium (AMIA 2007), Chicago, USA, November 2007