Biomedical subjects

Aldo Gangemi

Publications and source records attributed to Aldo Gangemi.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Coping with medical polysemy in the semantic web: the role of ontologies.

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon by which a term has more than one meaning. It is not a negligible issue in information management, since an effective and unambiguous sharing of the semantic content of data among different databases or knowledge repositories is needed. The paper illustrates a case of polysemy (concerning inflammation), and puts it within the framework provided by the DOLCE+ foundational ontology. This solution enables us to formally represent several senses of inflammation, and their interrelationships. This we take as a demonstration of how ontologies play an essential role in providing precisely the conceptual foundations that are needed in order to make the intended meaning of natural language expressions available to all the (artificial or human) agents that could be involved in the semantic web

Humans↗

PubMed2004

If ontology is the solution, what is the problem?

In this paper we show the usefulness of an ontological approach for solving some problems arising in medicine. We point out the relevance of terminological ontologies for disambiguating polysemous terms, for re-organizing very large corpora and detecting possible inconsistencies and for managing a catalog of bio-medical equipments. We also put in evidence the fundamental role played by ontologies when integration and interoperability of heterogeneous knowledge sources is needed, in particular in the field of clinical guidelines and evidence-based medicine.

Biomedical Engineering↗

PubMed2004

Inflammation ontology design pattern: an exercise in building a core biomedical ontology with descriptions and situations.

Formal ontology has proved to be an extremely useful tool for negotiating intended meaning, for building explicit, formal data sheets, and for the discovery of novel views on existing data structures. This paper describes an example of application of formal ontological methods to the creation of biomedical ontologies. Addressed here is the ambiguous notion of inflammation, which spans across multiple linguistic meanings, multiple layers of reality, and multiple details of granularity. We use UML class diagrams, description logics, and the DOLCE foundational ontology, augmented with the Description and Situation theory, in order to provide the representational and ontological primitives that are necessary for the development of detailed, flexible, and functional biomedical ontologies. An ontology design pattern is proposed as a modelling template for inflammations.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

An ontological framework for the implementation of clinical guidelines in health care organizations.

The paper presents the outlines of an ontology of plans and guidelines, which is then used as the basis for a framework for implementing guideline-based systems for the management of workflow in health care organizations. The framework has a number of special features, above all in that it enables us to represent in formal terms assignments of work-items both to individuals and to teams and to tailor guideline to specific contexts of application in health care organizations. It is designed also to enable implementations to do justice to the fact that the processes carried out in health care organizations may deviate in different ways from the norms set forth in corresponding guideline definitions. This means that implementations built in conformity with the framework will be marked by a type of flexibility that might make them more likely to be accepted by healthcare professionals than are standard guideline-based management systems.

Medical Informatics↗