Designing Common Ontologies to Support Clinical Practice Guidelines using OWL-based ontologies

In order to support the development of clinical practice guideline (CPGs) the representation of clinical problems is necessary to actuate the relevant knowledge for well-defined and meaningful CPGs. However, the development process performed on CPGs usually relies on the cognitive models of the domain expert (clinicians) that are often based on technical and procedural knowledge which can carry implications for the development of CPGs. Thus, their formalization as computer-interpretable CPGs provides a better opportunity of influencing clinical practice than narrative guidelines. The focus of this study is on the acquisition of clinical knowledge into computer interpretable form to develop a semantically rich common ontology for CPG development. This study also views the role of the clinical expert as an essential source of transforming this knowledge into a common ontology. To ascertain a comprehensive knowledge representation of CPGs we analyzed abstracts taken from the sub-domains of HeartDiseases related to its diagnosis, possible treatments and interventions and structured them using the protege-OWL formal modelling tool. The completeness and expressiveness of the ontology is then validated using structured and unstructured queries.