TY - JOUR
T1 - A multilingual ontology for infectious disease surveillance
T2 - Rationale, design and challenges
AU - Collier, Nigel
AU - Kawazoe, Ai
AU - Jin, Lihua
AU - Shigematsu, Mika
AU - Dien, Dinh
AU - Barrero, Roberto A.
AU - Takeuchi, Koichi
AU - Kawtrakul, Asanee
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This study was supported by a grant from the Research Organization of Information Systems (ROIS). We also gratefully acknowledge useful discussions with Abla Mawudeku and Michael Blench at GPHIN about their system.
PY - 2006/12
Y1 - 2006/12
N2 - A lack of surveillance system infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region is seen as hindering the global control of rapidly spreading infectious diseases such as the recent avian H5N1 epidemic. As part of improving surveillance in the region, the BioCaster project aims to develop a system based on text mining for automatically monitoring Internet news and other online sources in several regional languages. At the heart of the system is an application ontology which serves the dual purpose of enabling advanced searches on the mined facts and of allowing the system to make intelligent inferences for assessing the priority of events. However, it became clear early on in the project that existing classification schemes did not have the necessary language coverage or semantic specificity for our needs. In this article we present an overview of our needs and explore in detail the rationale and methods for developing a new conceptual structure and multilingual terminological resource that focusses on priority pathogens and the diseases they cause. The ontology is made freely available as an online database and downloadable OWL file.
AB - A lack of surveillance system infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region is seen as hindering the global control of rapidly spreading infectious diseases such as the recent avian H5N1 epidemic. As part of improving surveillance in the region, the BioCaster project aims to develop a system based on text mining for automatically monitoring Internet news and other online sources in several regional languages. At the heart of the system is an application ontology which serves the dual purpose of enabling advanced searches on the mined facts and of allowing the system to make intelligent inferences for assessing the priority of events. However, it became clear early on in the project that existing classification schemes did not have the necessary language coverage or semantic specificity for our needs. In this article we present an overview of our needs and explore in detail the rationale and methods for developing a new conceptual structure and multilingual terminological resource that focusses on priority pathogens and the diseases they cause. The ontology is made freely available as an online database and downloadable OWL file.
KW - Infectious disease surveillance
KW - Multilingual ontology
KW - Text mining
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U2 - 10.1007/s10579-007-9019-7
DO - 10.1007/s10579-007-9019-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:35548968033
SN - 1574-020X
VL - 40
SP - 405
EP - 413
JO - Language Resources and Evaluation
JF - Language Resources and Evaluation
IS - 3-4
ER -
