Building a schistosomiasis process ontology for an epidemiological monitoring system

Abstract

This chapter describes the design of an ontology that aims to support a monitoring system for schistosomiasis. On one hand, a domain ontology for the schistosomiasis is built to support communication and collaborative work between domain experts along the monitoring steps. The domain ontology also supports data and application integration and allows some reasoning capabilities. On the other hand, a process ontology of the schistosomiasis spreading is built for explanations and decision-making. Furthermore, the possibilities of using this process ontology for prediction are also worth considering. Here, we have focused on the design of the process ontology of infectious disease spreading and its extension to schistosomiasis. We aim to provide a formal theory in the health domain to conceptualize the processes of the infectious disease spreading and to present reasoning capabilities on the disease occurrences within a population. We emphasize on the basic entities and their relations within the complex process of infectious disease spreading. A multi-level analysis of the global dynamics is provided, taking into account biomedical, clinical and epidemiological dependences. We then propose a formalization of the infectious disease spreading process. Finally, we extend the process ontology for schistosomiasis spreading in Senegal. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.