Evaluation of ontologies.pdfVIP

Ontology for task-based clinical guidelines and the theory of granular partitions a b Anand Kumar , Barry Smith a Laboratory of Medical Informatics, Department of Computer Science, University of Pavia, Italy. b Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, University of Leipzig, Germany and Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo Published in Proceedings of 9th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Europe (AIME 2003), (Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence 2780), Berlin: Springer, 2003, 71–75. Abstract. The theory of granular partitions (TGP) is a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and other classificatory systems. The paper explores the use of this new theory in the treatment of task-based clinical guidelines as a means for better understanding the relations between different clinical tasks, both within the framework of a single guideline and between related guidelines. We used as our starting point a DAML+OIL-based ontology for the WHO guideline for hypertension management, comparing this with related guidelines and attempting to show that TGP provides a flexible and highly expressive basis for the manipulation of ontologies of a sort which might be useful in providing more adequate Computer Interpretable Guideline Models (CIGMs) in the future. 1. Introduction 1.1 Clinical Practice Guidelines from an ontological point of view Clinical Practice Guidelines (GLs) are ‘systematically developed statemen