Ontology of Consumer Health Vocabulary: providing a formal and interoperable semantic resource for linking lay language and medical terminology

The Consumer Health Vocabulary has been an important contribution to the health informatics field since its introduction in 2006. Many studies have utilized the vocabulary for various scientific research to bridge the gap between consumers and health experts. Given the flat file format of the Consumer Health Vocabulary dataset, we developed a SKOS-based ontology of the dataset. As an ontology, this dataset can be semantically linked to other resources to provide consumer-level meaning. In addition with this artifact, we plan to further expand the terminology.