Meeting on Current UB Ontology Projects

Monday December 14, 3pm, IHI (923 Main Street, Buffalo)

3:15pm Jonathan Bona and Carmelo Gaudioso

Toward Ontology-based Representation of Cancer Clinical Guidelines

We are developing ontology-based computable representations of NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines realized as OWL documents that explicitly represent the logical structure of the guidelines' contents (workflows, recommendations, etc) for use in automated decision support and compliance metrics within the context of multidisciplinary cancer care. This work uses existing Open Biomedical Ontologies where possible, and other resources such as the NCBI Taxonomy, to build representations of the relevant entities. Our goal is to improve the usability and accuracy of healthcare processes and informations systems that use the guidelines.

3:40pm Fernanda Farinelli

Obstetric and Neonatal Information Portal: An Ontologically Realist Proposal

EHRs related to care in the prenatal, labor, delivery, puerperal and newborn phases are necessary to ensure continuity of care for both infant and mother. Such continuity of care is needed even where patient care is taking place within a plurality of health system perhaps located in different geographical locations or political jurisdictions. Business intelligence (BI) tools have been developed as a vehicle for making decisions on the basis of data from multiple sources. However, to work effectively such tools require semantic interoperability of the data to which they are applied. I will use the approach of ontological realism to overcome semantic incompatibilities found in obstetric and neonatal systems, and attempt to show how this can foster better decision-making in the application of healthcare resources.

4:05pm Francesco Furini

Ontology in Manufacturing: The Example of Functionally Graded Material

I will use BFO as a starting point for formulating mid-level descriptions of manufacturing activities, using the steps involved in manufacturing functionally graded materials as case study.

4:30pm Rahul Rai

Design-for-Manufacturing Ontology

In recent years, ontologies are increasingly used for knowledge management in engineering. The primary aim of this talk is to put forward the process of ontology development and utilization in the field of Design-For-Manufacturing and to study the most important phases in the process, including: class hierarchy development and methods to support knowledge capture and reuse. A few cases are also presented to illustrate uses of a DFM ontology.