Building an ontology of cardio-vascular diseases for concept-based information retrieval

Word-based information retrieval (IR) suffers from several drawbacks which the semantic Web initiative aims at overcoming through the use of ontologies. The European project Noesis (WWW.noesis-eu.org) is currently developing a concept-based approach to IR with cardio-vascular diseases as an application domain. For this purpose, an ontology of CV diseases had to be built. We present the process of its construction and its possible usages