Ontology-Based Visualization of Healthcare Data Mined from Online Healthcare Forums

With the widespread growth of social networking there are several online forums that are dedicated to discussing health and well-being. These forums are great resources for collecting patient and health related information, as people tend to freely share and discuss their health conditions and treatments with others having similar experiences. There are several methods available for extracting data from such online forums, however, there isn´t a structured way for storing such information. With vast amount of data being collected from several different sources it is not only important to have structure, but also some semantic information associated with the data so that it can be processed autonomously without human intervention. An ontology can help in addressing this need. In this paper we present a Healthcare Forum Mining Ontology which defines health and patient related terms that can be extracted from the messages posted in online healthcare forums, along with the relationships between those terms. The availability of this information would be of immense help to clinical research which often lacks full access to patient data due to its privacy-sensitive nature. We demonstrate the usefulness of this ontology using a visualization tool which can be used to: (i) analyze the profiles of patients undergoing treatment for a given disease/health condition and (ii) visualize the associations between the healthcare data stored as a part of the ontology´s knowledge base.