Representing Knowledge in Oral Medicine : Remodeling Clinical Examinations Using OWL

This report describes the remodeling of the representation of clinical examinations in oral medicine, from the previous proprietary format used by the MedView project, to using the World Wide Web Consortium's recommendations Web Ontology Language (OWL) and Resource Description Framework (RDF). This includes the representation of (1) examination templates, (2) lists of values that can be included in individual examination records, and (3) aggregates of such values used for e.g., analyzing and visualizing data. It also includes the representation of (4) individual examination records. We describe how OWL and RDF are used to represent these different knowledge components of MedView, along with the design decisions made in the remodeling process. These design decisions are related to, among other things, whether or not to use the constructs of domain and range, appropriate naming in URIs, the level of detail to initially aim for, and appropriate use of classes and individuals. A description of how these new representations are used in the previous applications and code base is also given, as well as their use in the Swedish Oral Medicine Web (SOMWeb) online community. We found that OWL and RDF can be used to address most, but not all, of the requirements we compiled based on the limitations of the MedView knowledge model. Our experience in using OWL and RDF is that, while there is much useful support material available, there is some lack of support for important design decisions and best practice guidelines are still under development. At the same time, using OWL gives us access to a potentially beneficial array of externally developed tools and the ability to come back and refine the knowledge model after initial deployment