Extracting Ontology from Medical Documents with Ontology Maturing Process

Ontology maintenance is a time consuming and costly process which requires special skill and knowledge. It requires joint effort of both ontology engineer and domain specialist to properly maintain ontology and update knowledge in it. This is specially true for medical domain which is highly specialized domain. This paper proposes a novel approach for maintenance and update of existing ontologies in a medical domain. The proposed approach is based on modified Ontology Maturing Process which was originally developed for web domain. The proposed approach provides way to populate medical ontology with new knowledge obtained from medical documents. This is achieved through use of natural language processing techniques and highly specialized medical knowledge bases such as Unified Medical Language System.