Onto-mQoL · Extensions of Temporal Representations for Ontology-based and Holistic Reasoning in the Mobile Quality of Life Domain

Extensions of Temporal Representations for Ontology-based and Holistic Reasoning in the Mobile Quality of Life Domain

While temporal aspects are usually present in the health domain, modelling information evolving time/events in ontologies is a complex problem because temporal relations are ternary and cannot be directly handled by ontology languages. This problem happens because ontologies use Description Logic (DL) as a formal basis, which is a decidable fragment of the first-order logic that only uses unary (concepts) and binary (roles) predicates. Current temporal extensions that are compatible with the existing ontology resources (e.g., reasoners and DL formalism) are limited in aspects related to uncertain time, evolution of events, and relations between time concepts. This lack of expressive and standards-compatible temporal representations restricts the range of reasoning processes because several time aspects, usually embedded in the health and QoL domain, cannot be employed. The expressive temporal notion is important for healthcare knowledge representations because it allows a more comprehensive understanding of patient's health history and how daily behaviors affect their well-being. Moreover, this knowledge can facilitate accurate diagnosis and treatment planning and underpin various aspects of healthcare and behavior change decision-making. Thus, such technology can enable the delivery of better health services that benefit society in general. This project aimed to design a conceptual framework for representation and reasoning about temporal aspects associated with an ontological engineering method to guide the use of this novel framework while converting static ontologies to their temporal versions. Thus, the project advances the state of the art as follows: • Extension of temporal representations so they consider different time concepts (moments and intervals), time concept properties (precise and uncertain), time relations (interval-interval, interval-moment, and moment-moment), and time relation properties (qualitative and quantitative). • Recent approaches for temporal reasoning are based on theories (e.g., Fuzzy Theory Sets and Temporal DLs) incompatible with the current Semantic Web standards (e.g., DL formalism and reasoners). Maintaining this compatibility is an important premise and contribution of this present project. • The associated engineering method is an innovation proposed in this project since other approaches do not present pragmatic strategies to apply their contributions. • Finally, this project demonstrates the importance of holistic representations in temporal QoL domains using experiments with existent datasets.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз