Introduction to OWL Web Ontology Language for Medical and Biosciences Applications (Continued)

Previous  Next Contents  References Collaboration between Users with OWL Now that we have seen the basics of OWL and looked at an example, I would like to ask the question who is going to use OWL?  The different users I imagine for a medical information system are shown in the figure below. Users of an OWL Medical Information System I mentioned a number of tools in a previous section.  Most of these tools are for data modeling and software development.  Subject matter experts are needed to create the content. In the medical information system this content is the information necessary to interpret the laboratory results and flag any problem results. One problem with the state of the art in ontology at present is that a subject matter expert needs to also be competent in data modeling.

A variation on subject matter expert is the person creating individual instances of classes.  This person need not be an expert in data modeling but needs to be able to select the appropriate class to instantiate.  In the medical information system this would be the person entering the laboratory test information.

The other users of this medical application are physicians and patients.  Those users explore and otherwise make use of the content created by the subject matter expert to interpret (physician) and view (patient) the laboratory test results in the context provided by the subject matter expert.

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