Towards an Applied Oral Health Ontology: A Round Trip between Clinical Data and Experiential Medical Knowledge

It is a widely accepted fact that there is much tacit knowledge being used in daily medical practice, which remains to be unknown knowns, or inexpressible known knowns. On the other hand, health information systems developers are determined to make clinical information standardized, exchangeable, and machine-understandable to certain extent. This paper reports our experience in developing an applied ontology capturing oral health knowledge derived from data sources such as standard terminology, doctors´ inputs, medical journals and textbooks, online knowledge bases, and its application in a few typical usage scenarios, such as: (1) managing the domain-specific terminology in clinical information systems, (2) modeling the meta-data schemas for electronic medical repositories from a patient-centric view, (3) Managing the interactions between the data instances and knowledge models, providing knowledge applicants and deriving potential disease-specific, or treatment-specific knowledge models based on doctor´s concerns and needs of particular clinical cases.