Developing a mobile-based disease ontology for traditional Persian medicine

Abstract

Introduction: The use of traditional medicine has increased in many countries over the past decades. However, computer applications have been rarely developed and used in this field. This study aimed to develop a mobile-based disease ontology for traditional Persian medicine. Methods: This research was carried out in two phases. In the first phase, the Methontology method was used for ontology development, and the ontology was evaluated in terms of accuracy and domain coverage. In the second phase, a mobile-based application was developed, and its usability was evaluated by traditional Persian medicine specialists. Results: Initially, diseases were divided into 24 groups. The results showed that the developed ontology covered the concepts of traditional Persian medicine (90%) and their synonyms in English (83%) successfully. In terms of accuracy, the values for the concepts and their synonyms in English were (14%) and (46%), respectively. Eventually, users implemented the mobile-based application and evaluated its usability at a satisfactory level. Conclusion: The disease ontology developed in the current study can provide traditional Persian medicine specialists and researchers with consistent, reusable, and sustainable descriptions of disease terms. In order to complete the ontology and use it in clinical decision support systems, expanding the ontology and adding more details to each disease are recommended.

Keywords

• Traditional medicine
• Traditional Persian medicine
• Ontology development
• Ontology evaluation
• Mobile applications