Ontologies in the Health Field

Abstract

Health data and knowledge had been structured through medical classifications and taxonomies long before ontologies had acquired their pivot status of the Semantic Web. Although there is no consensus on a common definition of an ontology, it is necessary to understand their main features to be able to use them in a pertinent and efficient manner for data mining purposes. This chapter introduces the basic notions about ontologies, presents a survey of their use in medicine and explores some related issues: knowledge bases, terminology, and information retrieval. It also addresses the issues of ontology design, ontology representation, and the possible interaction between data mining and ontologies.