Research

Abstract:

The use of traditional medicine is increasing rapidly in many societies due to its efficiency and affordability. The locally available herbs are basically used in the treatment of symptoms and diseases. Herbal Medicines have proved effective in many cases and outperformed the chemical drugs. Subsequently, the need arose to develop an herbal repository containing the taxonomy hierarchy that represents the structured knowledge of herbs and could be integrated in many medical applications that use the herbs in the treatment in an accurate and effective way

Today, Medical ontologies have become the most efficient way for representing declarative knowledge about diseases, symptoms, medications, and diagnosis

Many ontologies have been elaborated in the few past years for some well-known traditional medicine like the Chinese, African and Korean traditional medicine

Few of these existing ontologies tried to relate traditional medicine ontologies with known “modern” medical ontologies

Linking traditional medicine ontologies with medical ontologies can benefit in the treatment process where herbs can be used effectively

In this paper, we are proposing a new ontology to be used for the herbal medicine. We are also introducing an algorithm to align our ontology with the symptoms ontology SYMP and with the diseases ontology DOID. The MeSH ontology is the source of our herbal concepts

We are actually using this ontology in an educational expert system that prescribes herbs for the treatment of casual symptoms. In addition, new herbal blends can be suggested, and conflicting herbs effects can be detected through this system. A simple e-health portal has been developed to interact with the expert system

Name of journal in which the research was published: 

Journal of Digital Information Management 

Publication Date:

2018.

Link:

Building a Herbal Medicine Ontology Aligned with Symptoms and Diseases Ontologies