CTS2 OWL: Mapping OWL Ontologies to CTS2 Terminology Resources

Abstract

The advancement of healthcare towards P5 medicine requires communication and cooperation between all actors and institutions involved. Interoperability must go beyond integrating data from different sources and include the understanding of the meaning of the data in the context of concepts and contexts they represent for a specific use case. In other words, we have to advance from data sharing through sharing semantics up to sharing clinical and medical knowledge. According to the Good Modeling Best Practices, we have to start with describing the real-world business system by domain experts using Domain Ontologies before transforming it into an information and communication technology (ICT) system, thereafter specifying the informational components and then transforming the system into an implementable solution. Any representation style - in the system development process acc. to ISO 10746 called system view - is defined by a related ontology, to be distinguished from real-world domain ontologies representing the knowledge spaces of involved disciplines. The system enabling such representational transformation shall also support versioning as well as the management of historical evolutions. One of such systems is the Common Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2), which is a standard that allows the complete management of terminological contents. The main objective of this work is to present the choices we made to transform an ontology, written in the standard Ontology Web Language (OWL), into the CTS2 objects. We tested our transformation approach with the Alzheimer's Disease Ontology. We managed to map all the elements of the considered ontology to CTS2 terminological resources, except for a subset of elements such as the equivalentClass derived from restrictions on other classes.