Aligning reference terminologies and knowledge bases in the health care domain

Abstract

We study the general question of how knowledge bases can be designed in small domains and scale, importing reference terminologies and taking into account the methodologies and tools available nowadays. For this, we have carried out a case study on a knowledge base oriented to support a diagnosis-aid application in ophthalmology. Our study emphasizes the advantages of extending a knowledge base with a new component that holds both a meta-model representing a very simplified structure of a terminology system and a set of constraints expressed using an axiom language. This set of constraints allows us to check the consistency and coherence of the imported information. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.