Meeting on Current UB Ontology Projects

Toward Ontology-based Representation of Cancer Clinical Guidelines Jonathan Bona and Carmelo Gaudioso

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.

Obstetric and Neonatal Information Portal: An Ontologically Realist Proposal Fernanda Farinelli

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.

Francesco Furini: Ontology in Manufacturing: The Example of Functionally Graded Materials 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.

Rahul