An ontology of therapies

Abstract

Ontologies are the essential glue to build interoperable systems and the talk of the day in the medical community. In this paper we present the ontology of medical therapies developed in the course of the Oncocure project, aimed at building a guideline based decision support integrated with a legacy Electronic Patient Record (EPR). The therapy ontology is based upon the DOLCE top level ontology. It is our opinion that our ontology, besides constituting a model capturing the precise meaning of therapy-related concepts, can serve for several practical purposes: interfacing automatic support systems with a legacy EPR, allowing the automatic data analysis, and controlling possible medical errors made during EPR data input. © 2010 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.