The Medical Semantic Web

Abstract

In this paper, the need for the right information for patients with chronic diseases is elaborated, followed by some scenarios of how the semantic web can be utilised to retrieve useful and precise information by stakeholders. In previous work, the author has demonstrated the automation of knowledge acquisition from the current web is becoming an important step towards this goal. The aim was twofold; first to learn what types of information exist in chronic disease-related websites, and secondly how to extract and structure such information into machine understandable form. It has been shown that these websites exhibit many common concepts which resulted in the construction of the ontology to guide in extracting information for new unseen websites. Also, the study has resulted in the development of a platform for information extraction that utilises the ontology. Continuous work has opened many issues which are disussed in this paper. While further work is still needed, the experiments to date have shown encouraging results.