OntoPhaco: An Ontology for Virtual Reality Training in Ophthalmology Domain—A Case Study of Cataract Surgery

Performing a safe and successful cataract surgery greatly depends on the effective training programs of the residents that are commonly offered by several public and private healthcare providers. Virtual Reality Training (VRT) as a training tool for example, expresses potential capabilities to improve the learning curve, increasing trainee confidence and acquisition of skills. However, the success of this tool highly depends on how close this tool is to the reality. Ontology is called as a significant modelling tool which can help to provide a shared and common understanding of a domain, and in this scenario, a standardized terminology for representing the training domain, and actions taking place in Virtual Environment (VE). Recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) findings show that most ontology designs for VRT are not built systematically and there is no ontology describing the domain knowledge for VRT in the ophthalmology field. There is also a lack of a high achievement rate in implementing ontology driven VRT, calls for systematic and comprehensive steps. Therefore, in order to lower the failure rate of ontology applied to VRT, OntoPhaco was designed and developed based on philosophically grounded foundational ontologies, namely, Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO). The evaluation results showed that the use of OntoPhaco was able to improve the student’s learning experience, assist effectively in building VR training scenarios, and lead to a successful VRT processes. The lessons learnt from designing OntoPhaco for this domain could generally generate valuable contribution to the theory and practice of VRT, knowledge management and ontology engineering in complex domains.