Ontology development for the masses: Creating ICD-11 in WebProtégé

Abstract

The World Health Organization is currently developing the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). ICD is the standard diagnostic classification used in health care all over the world. In contrast to previous ICD revisions that did not have a formal representation and were mainly available as printed books, ICD-11 uses OWL for the formal representation of its content. In this paper, we report on our work to support the collaborative development of ICD-11 in WebProtégé - a web-based ontology browser and editor. WebProtégé integrates collaboration features directly into the editing process. We report on the results of the evaluation that we performed during a two-week meeting with the ICD editors in Geneva. We performed the evaluation in the context of the editors learning to use WebProtégé to start the ICD-11 development. Participants in the evaluation were optimistic that collaborative development will work in this context, but have raised a number of critical issues. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.