Abstract
LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes) is one of the standardized health ontologies that is widely used by practitioners in the health sector. Like other ontologies in health field, LOINC evolves. This research focuses on representing formally the conceptual changes in LOINC. Four steps are taken to achieve this goal. First, the release of LOINC is studied to get an overview of the changes in LOINC. Secondly, the change operations that occur in LOINC are classified. Third, the changes are represented formally by considering the need to keep the history of changes in concepts. Finally, a few algorithms are developed to identify changes that occur between two releases of LOINC. The evaluation shows that the algorithms are able to identify change operations in LOINC with 100% of success rate. With a formal representation of changes that occur in LOINC, it is expected that adjustments to applications that use LOINC can be performed more straightforward. The history of reference to concepts in LOINC can also be traced back so that information about the changes on the reference can be obtained easily.
Highlights
At the moment, ontology is used in many areas
This research focuses on the formal representation of LOINC and the representation of change operations that occur in LOINC concepts
The classification of change operations is based on the changes that occur in the release of LOINC
Summary
Ontology is used in many areas. Ontology is the representation of knowledge in a certain domain of interest. The definition of the term cephalometric (standardized measurement from the angle and distance between specific landmarks of X-ray film that is used for orthodontic treatment planning and varied research applications) that originates from 10 different standards can be unified into single terminology taken from LOINC Another use of LOINC is in information retrieval applications. As LOINC continues to develop, there is a possibility that changes to a concept do happen once during its www.ijacsa.thesai.org (IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol 10, No 1, 2019 lifetime If this happens, applications that use LOINC as a reference should keep a history of changes that occur in the corresponding concept. If a backward trace is needed about why a reference changes, the application can look at the history of the concepts it refers to This is possible if the evolution of the concepts in LOINC is formally represented.
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