Ontology development based on Unified Medical Language System: a case study of Iranian Medicinal Plants Ontology

Ontology is an explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them. Ontologies are useful in medicine.Clinical decision support systems, medical expert systems, and biomedical databases are somehow related to ontologies. In this article we developed Iranian Medicinal Plants Ontology (IranMedPlantsOnt) based on Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).

The population of this descriptive survey was Iranian medicinal plants. Sample of this study was 2 plants chosen by theoretical sampling method. Also 2 books were chosen for extracting concepts and relations. In information extraction process, knowledge engineering approach was used. Also ontology building was based on the method proposed by Noy & McGuinness and Dumontier & Villanueva-Rosales using Protégé 4.2.beta. Findings/

We proposed 1 steps for medical ontology building in Persian. Determining the scope and domain of ontology, reusing of UMLS, extracting of concept pairs and mapping them to the UMLS, defining of classes, defining of properties, defining of facets and creation of instances are these seven steps. According to this study, UMLS is effective as a seed ontology for building Iranian medicinal plants ontology. Also the method proposed in this research can be used for building medical domain ontologies in Persian language.