Pages: (1-12 )
Abstract
Yorùbá Traditional Medicine (YTM) have been mainly observed, practiced and communicated without paying adequate attention to how its knowledge can be standardized and formalized. The goal of this paper is to develop a theoretically-grounded general-purpose computational ontology and tackles a number of conceptual modelling problems in Yoruba world-view. Information related to the use of herbal medicine are scattered across various data sources and they are represented in an unstructured manner. Ontological modelling encourages standardization of terms used to represent knowledge about a domain by providing means to represent conceptual knowledge using expressive formal logics. This paper presents a discussion on the process and product of an experience in developing a formal computational ontology model for the health sector. Particularly, this process was applied to develop ontology for Yorùbá Traditional Medicine.
Keywords: Herbal medicine, ontology, inference, health care, knowledge representation, ontology modularization, semantics web,