OSHCO: A Cross-domain Ontology for semantic interoperability across medical and oral health domains

Literature has repeatedly stressed the importance of the association between the oral health and general health of an individual and for the respective healthcare practitioners to work collaboratively. However, the absence of a knowledge base of the scientific evidence of associations between the two domains of medical and oral health has contributed to the problem of fragmented healthcare delivery. Hence, capturing and formally representing this cross-domain knowledge is vital for next generation health information systems (HIS) to become interoperable and perform decision support tasks. To this end, ontologies have been increasingly used in HIS for representing domain knowledge; but since no comprehensive ontology relevant to both the medical and oral health domains exists no knowledge base exists either. In this paper, we present our work on addressing this issue by building an Oral-Systemic Health Cross-domain Ontology (OSHCO) to capture the inter-dependent conditions across both the domains. We further extend the ontology with rules to add expressivity and derive inferences over instance data.