A Chronic Disease Self-Management System Based on OWL-Based Ontologies and Semantic Rules

Chronic disease self-management contains many aspects of knowledge, such as disease, nutrition, exercise, pharmacy and medical guidelines. This study aims to integrate the knowledge from various domains and develop a chronic disease self-management knowledge base (CDSMKB) using web ontology language (OWL) and semantic rules in Jena rule format. A mobile chronic disease self-management system (CDSMS) is designed and constructed based on CDSMKB. The Jena semantic web framework is adopted to transform patient clinical data and process data to semantic data, which is stored in the designed semantic data models (SDMs). By reasoning rules in CDSMKB with the semantic patient data, the CDSMS generates personalized treatment plans and adjustment suggestions for the patients with chronic diseases, which improve the operability and effectiveness of the implementation of chronic disease self-management.