A guiding framework for ontology reuse in the biomedical domain

Though recent research has established the inter-dependencies between several medical and oral health conditions, e-Health systems for medical and oral domains have been designed and implemented to operate independently. Such disparate systems coupled with different data capture and storage formats have led to the formation of medical-dental silos. In this paper, we advocate development of a knowledge base of formal ontology and rules that can help in reducing such silos. For this purpose, we argue that a cross-domain ontology of medical and oral health concepts should be developed by reusing SNOMED-CT. In order to prevent the replication of some of the inherent problems of SNOMED-CT in the resultant ontology, we have further developed a novel guiding framework for steering through the development process. We anticipate that it will function as a generic framework to guide the development of any biomedical ontology that needs to reuse an ontology such as SNOMED-CT.