Ontology-Based Approach for Managing Personal Health and Wellness Information

This paper describes a new approach for collecting and sharing personal health and wellness information. The approach is based on a personal health record (PHR) including both clinical and non-clinical data. The PHR is located on a network server referred as common server. The overall service architecture for providing anonymous and private access to the PHR is described. Semantic interoperability is based on an ontology collection and usage of OID (object identifier) codes. The formal (upper) ontology combines a set of domain ontologies representing different aspects of personal health and wellness. The ontology collection emphasizes wellness aspects while clinical data is modelled by using OID references to existing vocabularies. Modular ontology approach enables distributed management and expansion of the data model.