Building a Herbal Medicine Ontology Aligned with Symptoms and Diseases Ontologies
Bassel Alkhatib, Dania Briman
Journal of Digital Information Management, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2018.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6025/jdim/2018/16/3/114-126
Link: http://dline.info/fpaper/jdim/v16i3/jdimv16i3_2.pdf
Abstract:
The use of traditional medicine is increasing
rapidly in many societies due to its efficiency and
affordability. The locally available herbs are basically used
in the treatment of symptoms and diseases. Herbal
Medicines have proved effective in many cases and
outperformed the chemical drugs.
Subsequently, the need arose to develop an herbal
repository containing the taxonomy hierarchy that
represents the structured knowledge of herbs and could
be integrated in many medical applications that use the
herbs in the treatment in an accurate and effective way.
Today, Medical ontologies have become the most efficient
way for representing declarative knowledge about
diseases, symptoms, medications, and diagnosis.
Many ontologies have been elaborated in the few past
years for some well-known traditional medicine like the
Chinese, African and Korean traditional medicine.
Few of these existing ontologies tried to relate traditional
medicine ontologies with known 'modern' medical
ontologies.
Linking traditional medicine ontologies with medical
ontologies can benefit in the treatment process where
herbs can be used effectively.
In this paper, we are proposing a new ontology to be used
for the herbal medicine. We are also introducing an
algorithm to align our ontology with the symptoms ontology
SYMP and with the diseases ontology DOID. The MeSH
ontology is the source of our herbal concepts.
We are actually using this ontology in an educational expert
system that prescribes herbs for the treatment of casual
symptoms. In addition, new herbal blends can be
suggested, and conflicting herbs effects can be detected
through this system. A simple e-health portal has been
developed to interact with the expert system.