Towards the Mental Health Ontology

Lots of research have been done within the mental health domain, but exact causes of mental illness are still unknown. Concerningly, the number of people being affected by mental conditions is rapidly increasing and it has been predicted that depression would be the world's leading cause of disability by 2020. Most mental health information is found in electronic form. Application of the cutting-edge information technologies within the mental health domain has the potential to greatly increase the value of the available information. Specifically, ontologies form the basis for collaboration between research teams, for creation of semantic Web services and intelligent multi-agent systems, for intelligent information retrieval, and for automatic data analysis such as data mining. In this paper, we present mental health ontology which can be used to underpin a variety of automatic tasks and positively transform the way information is being managed and used within the mental health domain.