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BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 1/2018

Open Access 01-12-2018 | Research article

SNOMED CT standard ontology based on the ontology for general medical science

Authors: Shaker El-Sappagh, Francesco Franda, Farman Ali, Kyung-Sup Kwak

Published in: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making | Issue 1/2018

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Abstract

Background

Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT, hereafter abbreviated SCT) is a comprehensive medical terminology used for standardizing the storage, retrieval, and exchange of electronic health data. Some efforts have been made to capture the contents of SCT as Web Ontology Language (OWL), but these efforts have been hampered by the size and complexity of SCT.

Method

Our proposal here is to develop an upper-level ontology and to use it as the basis for defining the terms in SCT in a way that will support quality assurance of SCT, for example, by allowing consistency checks of definitions and the identification and elimination of redundancies in the SCT vocabulary. Our proposed upper-level SCT ontology (SCTO) is based on the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS).

Results

The SCTO is implemented in OWL 2, to support automatic inference and consistency checking. The approach will allow integration of SCT data with data annotated using Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontologies, since the use of OGMS will ensure consistency with the Basic Formal Ontology, which is the top-level ontology of the OBO Foundry. Currently, the SCTO contains 304 classes, 28 properties, 2400 axioms, and 1555 annotations. It is publicly available through the bioportal at http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/SCTO/ .

Conclusion

The resulting ontology can enhance the semantics of clinical decision support systems and semantic interoperability among distributed electronic health records. In addition, the populated ontology can be used for the automation of mobile health applications.
Footnotes
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Metadata
Title
SNOMED CT standard ontology based on the ontology for general medical science
Authors
Shaker El-Sappagh
Francesco Franda
Farman Ali
Kyung-Sup Kwak
Publication date
01-12-2018
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making / Issue 1/2018
Electronic ISSN: 1472-6947
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-018-0651-5

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