Abstract
Knowledge which is represented by formal logic are widely used in many domains such like artificial intelligence, information retrieval, e-commerce and so on. And for medical field, medical documentary records retrieval, information systems in hospitals, medical data sharing, remote treatment and expert systems need knowledge representation technology. To retrieve information intellectually and provide advanced information services, systematically controlled mechanism is needed to represent and share knowledge. Importantly, medical expert's knowledge should be represented in a form that is understandable to computers and also to humans to be applied to the medical information system supporting decision making. And it should have a suitable and efficient structure for its own purposes including reasoning, extendability of knowledge, management of data, accuracy of expressions, diversity, and so on. we call it ontology which can be processed with machines. We can use the ontology to represent traditional medicine knowledge in structured and systematic way with visualization, then also it can also be used education materials. Hence, the authors developed an Shanghanlun ontology by way of showing an example, so that we suggested a methodology for ontology development and also a model to structure the traditional medical knowledge. And this result can be used for student to learn Shanghanlun by graphical representation of it's knowledge. We analyzed the text of Shanghanlun to construct relational database including it's original text, symptoms and herb formulars. And then we classified the terms following some criterion, confirmed the structure of the ontology to describe semantic relations between the terms, especially we developed the ontology considering visual representation. The ontology developed in this study provides database showing fomulas, herbs, symptoms, the name of diseases and the text written in Shanghanlun. It's easy to retrieve contents by their semantic relations so that it is convenient to search knowledge of Shanghanlun and to learn it. It can display the related concepts by searching terms and provides expanded information with a simple click. It has some limitations such as standardization problems, short coverage of pattern(證), and error in chinese characters input. But we believe this research can be used for basic foundation to make traditional medicine more structural and systematic, to develop application softwares, and also to applied it in Shanghanlun educations.
