Automatic inference of indexing rules for MEDLINE

This paper describes the use and customization of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to infer indexing rules from MEDLINE citations. Preliminary results suggest this method may enhance the subheading attachment module of the Medical Text Indexer, a system for assisting MEDLINE indexers.

Efficient Results in Semantic Interoperability for Health Care. Findings from the Section on Knowledge Representation and Management.

To summarize excellent current research in the field of Knowledge Representation and Management (KRM) within the health and medical care domain. We provide a synopsis of the 2016 IMIA selected articles as well as a related synthetic overview of the current and future field activities. A first step of the selection was performed through MEDLINE querying with a list of MeSH descriptors completed by a list of terms adapted to the KRM section. The second step of the selection was completed by the two section editors who separately evaluated the set of 1,432 articles. The third step of the selection consisted of a collective work that merged the evaluation results to retain 15 articles for peer-review. The selection and evaluation process of this Yearbook's section on Knowledge Representation and Management has yielded four excellent and interesting articles regarding semantic interoperability for health care by gathering heterogeneous sources (knowledge and data) and auditing ontologies. In the first article, the authors present a solution based on standards and Semantic Web technologies to access distributed and heterogeneous datasets in the domain of breast cancer clinical trials. The second article describes a knowledge-based recommendation system that relies on ontologies and Semantic Web rules in the context of chronic diseases dietary. The third article is related to concept-recognition and text-mining to derive common human diseases model and a phenotypic network of common diseases. In the fourth article, the authors highlight the need for auditing the SNOMED CT. They propose to use a crowdbased method for ontology engineering. The current research activities further illustrate the continuous convergence of Knowledge Representation and Medical Informatics, with a focus this year on dedicated tools and methods to advance clinical care by proposing solutions to cope with the problem of semantic interoperability. Indeed, there is a need for powerful tools able to manage and interpret complex, large-scale and distributed datasets and knowledge bases, but also a need for user-friendly tools developed for the clinicians in their daily practice

Representing the mesh in owl: Towards a semi-automatic migration

Due to the numerous health documents available on the Web, information retrieval remains problematic with existing tools. This paper is positioned within the context of the CISMeF project (acronym of Catalogue and Index of French-speaking Medical Sites) and of a future Semantic Web. In CISMeF the resources are described using a set of metadata based on a structured terminology which “encapsulates ” the MeSH thesaurus in its French version. Now, the objective is to migrate the CISMeF terminology, and thus the MeSH thesaurus, to a formal ontology, so as to get a more powerful search tool. The paper presents the very first stage and results of this ongoing project, aiming at migrating the MeSH to OWL. It reports on the first steps, which have presently been done, concerning the automatic transformation of the terminology into OWL-DL. First, the CISMeF terminology has been “formalized ” in OWL. Then, the resulting OWL “ontology ” has been imported under the Protégé editor which makes possible to check its consistency and its classification in using Racer. Finally, the paper concludes on the current results and encountered difficulties, and gives future work perspectives