Ontology-Based Modeling of Clinical Reasoning in Traditional Chinese Medicine

The integration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Western Medicine (WM) requires extensive interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration. The productivity of integrated studies is often limited by the lack of understanding between practitioners from different cultural backgrounds. Information technologies, especially the Semantic Web and ontologies, can facilitate the exchange of medical information across discipline boundaries. We use Semantic Web technologies to engineer a TCM domain ontology named TCMOnto, covering categories such as basic theories, diagnostics, diseases, therapeutics, and medicinal treatments. TCMOnto formalizes the meaning of TCM concepts, and captures the semantic relations between them. This ontology can be used to represent knowledge resources such as medical rules, semantic queries, and semantic annotations for medical documents, and facilitate a variety of applications such as information integration and exchange, clinical intelligence, and knowledge management.