Ontology development for unified traditional Chinese medical language system

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as a complete knowledge system researches into human health conditions via a different approach compared to orthodox medicine. We are developing a unified traditional Chinese medical language system (UTCMLS) through an ontology approach that will support TCM language knowledge storage, concept-based information retrieval and information integration. UTCMLS is a huge knowledge project, which is a broad collaboration of 16 distributed groups, most of them with no prior experience of formal ontology development. Therefore, the cooperative and comprehensive ontology engineering is crucial. We use Protégé 2000 for ontology development of concepts and relationships that represent the domain and that will permit storage of TCM knowledge. This paper focuses on the methodology, design and development of ontology for UTCMLS.