Ontologies in current computer science parlance are computer based resources that represent agreed domain semantics. Unlike data models, the fundamental asset of ontologies is their relative independence of particular applications, i.e. an ontology consists of relatively generic knowledge that can be reused by different kinds of applications/tasks. The first part of this paper concerns some aspects that help to understand the differences and similarities between ontologies and data models. In the second part we present an ontology engineering framework that supports and favours the genericity of an ontology. We introduce the DOGMA ontology engineering approach that separates "atomic" conceptual relations from "predicative" domain rules. A DOGMA ontology consists of an
ontology base
that holds sets of intuitive context-specific conceptual relations and a layer of "relatively generic"
ontological commitments
that hold the domain rules. This constitutes what we shall call
the double articulation
of a DOGMA ontology
1
.
Abstract:An overview is given of natural language processing applications in medicine. An attempt has been made to enumerate the most important and known international projects and to summarize their goals, principles, methods and results. A section is devoted to projects involving the Dutch language. A more general discussion about the two fundamental approaches concerning medical language understanding is provided. An extensive bibliography may be useful for those wishing to explore this research domain.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.