Design and Construction of Nuclear Medicine Ontology

Considering the important role of ontologies in information organizations and increasing the efficiency of information retrieval systems and the growing development of the Nuclear Medicine field and its concepts, and the need for integrated and coherent organization and precise definition of relationships between these concepts, the present study is aimed at representing terms and concepts and designing the structure of Nuclear Medicine field by implementing an ontology in the mentioned field.

The research method is the field analysis. The required data were gathered from published information sources in the Nuclear Medicine field indexed in the INIS repository from 1985 to 2019 and their country of publication was Iran. The sevenstep method of Noy and McGuinnes has been used to construct the ontology, and the Na and Neo knowledge engineering approach has been used to extract the semantic relationships between the concepts.

Nuclear Medicine Ontology includes 224 concepts, 1584 axioms, 463 conceptual pairs, 926 object properties and 817 annotative properties derived from related information sources indexed in the INIS repository. Existing relationships between conceptual pairs are refined and enriched and described in terms of object and annotative properties.

Nuclear Medicine Ontology is an effective tool for knowledge representation in the mentioned field. The method used to extract the concepts of the field and enrich the relationships between concepts could be the basis for enriching the relations of the INIS Thesaurus and creating a basic ontology in the nuclear Field.