Semantic Knowledge Management for Herbal Medicines Used in Primary Health Care

Abstract

The use of medicinal plants or herbal medicines for the treatment of common and minor diseases and symptoms has been a part of culture and way of life. Semantic Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules for handling data. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated across people and application. In this study, we propose the herbal medicines used in primary health care ontology. The ontology was developed by using the Hozo, which is an ontology editor environment. The process of ontology development of this research are 2 phases. Phases 1: Domain analysis for knowledge organization approach and Phase 2: Ontology life cycle for an evolutionary approach. The Concepts of Herbal Medicines classes can be divided into 6 concepts. These include Habit, UseTheRightParts, Taste, HealthProblem, MethodForPreparation, and PartsUsed. The consequently developed ontology will serve to be highly useful for the development of ontology-based recommendation system.