CompoPHC: An ontology-based component for primary health care

Nowadays there is a real need for knowledge management in healthcare field due the explosion of information. Primary Health care is a rich domain in semantic relationships between entities and it often needs expressivity in modelling knowledge. The Brazilian Primary Health care has raised the number of professionals over the last decade, and there is a vast knowledge spread that needs to be recovered. It is difficult to keep specialized professionals in faraway areas. Most of the professionals working on these places are novice and face the need to constantly update their professional knowledge base that enables them to face the diversity and “adversity” of the health process in the daily routine. But there is not explicitly organized and documents. Ontologies nowadays play a central role knowledge representation, especially in biomedical field. Ontology is an abstraction of the reality providing relations and constraints, and can be understood by humans and processed by computers; Even so the use of ontologies in medical field is not new and is rising, the primary health care has few related works applying approach. This paper proposes a web component that enables the access of specialized knowledge applied to primary health care and creates a semantic layer that enhances the user queries with an ontology representing part of the Brazilian knowledge in Primary Health Care.