Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 569–582 Reflections on a medical ontology Bo Hu à , Srinandan Dasmahapatra, David Dupplaw, Paul Lewis, Nigel Shadbolt Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Available online 12 March 2007 Abstract In this paper we confront the divide between the ontologies developed from the requirement of comprehensive and general domain coverage and those devised to meet application-specific requirements. While the generalists typically attach philosophical sophistication to their approach, in supposed contrast to the narrow remit chosen by the application-bound knowledge engineers, we would like to indicate that the latter practice can often reflect a multi-faceted rationale, nuanced by the requirements of the domain. We demonstrate how the necessity of placing ontology-based systems with the work-practices of domain experts introduces unique demands on design rationales and enforces, often implicitly, a philosophical assessment of the necessary concepts and relations that balance the generality and specificity. Such demands are not addressed by generic approaches to modelling the reality of a domain. Indeed, we articulate the philosophical and practical considerations that we have taken into account when developing an application- specific ontology. We would certainly hope that our experiences can be of help to the development of ontologies in similar applications. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Medical ontology; Knowledge representation 1. Introduction Medical ontologies classify and encode relationships between nomenclature and/or concepts invoked in medical procedures and operations. These foster a mutual under- standing between human experts with different back- grounds as well as between human and software agents and between software agents alone. They are, thus, well suited to provide knowledge-level support for describing and putting together information-intensive applications in medicine; hence, a wide range of efforts are directed at designing medical ontologies. Among this wide spectrum of approaches which differ in complexity and scale, we can broadly distinguish two groups of approaches to medical ontology development: the general purpose ones that are application-independent (Hahn and Schulz, 2004; Smith et al., 2005), and those set up to drive a particular application. Examples of the former include the efforts towards controlled vocabulary in medical domain such as UMLS Metathesaurus, 1 SNOMED, 2 MeSH, 3 GALEN, 4 etc. The universal reach of these efforts requires substantial resources and extensive collaborative efforts, and often leaves a trail of philosophical commentary regarding the degree to which they can be transparent representations of reality (Smith, 2004). In contrast, many of the applications built in short-term projects in the second category tend to develop medical ontologies which appear to be ad hoc to some degree (Abu-Hanna et al., 2005), e.g. the Brazilian National Health Card Ontology, 5 the Drug Ontology Project for Elsevier, 6 Domain Ontology of EORCA project, 7 etc. Medical imaging with advanced knowledge technologies (MIAKT) was a 2-year project with the aim of providing a prototype for advanced knowledge services to breast cancer screening procedure and breast cancer triple ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhcs 1071-5819/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.02.005 à Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 23 80595052; fax: +44 23 80592865. E-mail addresses: bh@ecs.soton.ac.uk (B. Hu), sd@ecs.soton.ac.uk (S. Dasmahapatra), dpd@ecs.soton.ac.uk (D. Dupplaw), phl@ecs.soton. ac.uk (P. Lewis), nrs@ecs.soton.ac.uk (N. Shadbolt). 1 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/. 2 http://www.snomed.org/. 3 http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html. 4 http://www.opengalen.org. 5 http://www.tridedalo.com.br/ontologies. 6 http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/swc/dope.html/. 7 http://edisan.timone.univ-mrs.fr/eorca.