Modeling and Building an Ontology for Neuropediatric Physiotherapy Domain

This paper presents a methodology for modeling and building an ontology for the domain of neuropediatric physiotherapy. This is an area of great importance for health sciences and includes diagnosis, treatment and evaluation of patients with neurological injuries. The domain knowledge is, by nature, complex, ambiguous and non-standardized. We present formal methods for knowledge acquisition and representation, and building an ontology for the domain. The completeness and consistency of formal model was verified. The resulting knowledge-base yielded production rules employed in an expert system used by physiotherapists as a decision support aid in diagnosis. Overall, the main contribution of the work is a domain ontology based on consensus vocabulary for an important area of health sciences.