Sivaram Arabandi: Work Domain Ontology

Healthcare delivery processes are complex activities that involve different actors, with their capabilities, goals, preferences and commitments, and different resources provided by different parties at different locations. Healthcare is also a knowledge intensive domain, where perception and behavior are influenced by descriptive and prescriptive knowledge, acquired and exchanged largely through electronic means, interacting with numerous software applications that facilitate information management and communication. Furthermore, while the delivery of healthcare is largely undertaken or mediated by various knowledge workers, there further exists a substantial amount of physical or behavioral tasks that are heavily influenced by spatiotemporal characteristics. Lastly, the subjects of healthcare work processes (patients) are themselves complex adaptive systems that behave unpredictably and often require reactive situating and adaptive planning that result in reprioritization of tasks and activities. In order to conceptualize this "work domain", from the perspective of a large healthcare organization, we have assembled a family of ontologies, collectively named "work domain ontology". These ontologies, based on the alignment of the foundational ontologies BFO, DOLCE and UFO, are being purposed to (i) document clinical activities and the role played by information systems, (ii) capture the semantics of the data collected within a number of "source systems", (iii) inform a new generation of context aware applications and (iv) to manage knowledge assets within the scope of a broader knowledge management and delivery architecture.