Towards large scale modeling and realization of SNOMED CT in OWL-DL

SNOMED CT is a comprehensive medical terminology used for standardizing storage, retrieval and exchange of electronic health data. Towards more expressive knowledge representation, recent efforts have attempted to model SNOMED CT using OWL, but have often been stymied due to its size and complexity. This paper proposes a new approach to model and realize SNOMED¹ as an OWL ontology on large-scale. Rather than constructing raw owl files, we exploit a framework based on a triplestore-powered semantic backend that is interfaced through web services. With this framework, we show that almost the whole of the core tables of SNOMED including concepts, descriptions and relationships can be loaded into an OWL ontology, which can be queried in real-time. As part of the OWL modeling, we also propose a new strategy to model role groups via n-ary relationship ontology patterns. Through experiments on several use cases, we demonstrate that ours is a promising approach for modeling and realizing SNOMED in OWL.