Ontology-Based Reformulation of Health Consumer Queries Using Spreading Activation Techniques

The Internet has become an important source of medical information for patients and their family members: search for information about their diseases and recent clinical research, building numeric communities for exchange and sharing of information and personal experiences. However, access to the Internet does not mean access to information. The lack of familiarity with the medical language is a major problem for health consumers in information access and understanding. A breast cancer ontology has been built and gathers the terms used by lay people to talk about breast cancer. The resulting ontology has been the core of a health consumer query reformulation application. This work proposes the use of spreading activation technique through the ontology to infer new concepts from the ones initially identified in a health consumer question. Details on the ontology content are provided, along with a full description of the spreading activation algorithm and its preliminary evaluation.