Abstract
The goal of this study is to develop knowledge representation method for the construction and evaluation of ontology for diagnosis in oriental medicine. To develop the expert system for decision making on diagnosis and treatment, the systematic and structural knowledge which can be processible in EMR(Electronic Medical Record) must be precedent, and the Computational Process which control the system as well. This study set up an ontology as a trial model to represent the oriental medical knowledge into the machine processible one. Protege 2.1 has been used to build the ontology, and the serialization format of our ontology is the XML document based on OWL. The components of oriental medical diagnosis was arranged with the combination of symptoms which belong to the certain symptom patterns. Then natural language which expresses the oriental medical diagnosis components were converted into the logical sentence, and individual characteristic symptoms into each values of specific properties. In addition to the study, the diagnosis software for oriental medicine was developed and it used the ontology which we developed. Sequently, we tested the software to confirm the appropriateness of ontology. The result of the test shows that diagnostic questions are automatically formulated according to the diagnosis components of this ontology and that as such diagnostic results are induced. Therefore, the ontology system in this study will be efficient to develop the diagnosis program and useful as a tool for doctors to make decision. But, it is not recommendable to apply the system to the clinical environment until the clear diagnosis standards are introduced, and the more reliable diagnosis program can be developed based on the more appropriate ontology mentioned above.
