The use of traditional medicine is increasing rapidly in many societies due to its efficiency and affordability. Practitioners use locally available herbs and plants to treat illnesses and prepare various herbal wellness tonics and other remedies. Herbal medicines have been proved to be effective in many cases and outperformed chemical drugs.
Subsequently, it becomes essential to develop an herbal repository containing the hierarchical taxonomy that represents the structured knowledge of herbs. Various medical applications can benefit from this repository to ensure the accuracy and the effectiveness of the use of herbs for healing.
Today, medical ontologies have become the most efficient way for representing declarative knowledge about diseases, symptoms, medications, and diagnoses.
Many ontologies have been elaborated in the few past years for some well-known traditional medicines like those identified in China, Africa and Korea. Some of them tried to relate traditional medicine ontologies with known "modern" medical ontologies. Linking traditional medicine ontologies with medical ontologies would promote the use of herbs efficiently.
In this paper, we proposed a new ontology for the herbal medicine. We also introduced an algorithm to align our ontology with the symptom ontology (SYMP) and the disease ontology (DOID). The MeSH ontology is the source of our herbal concepts. We are using this ontology in an educational expert system that prescribes herbs for the treatment of casual symptoms, suggests new herbal blends, and detects the interactions of herbs. We have also developed a simple e-health portal that interacts with the expert system.
Key words: Herbal Medicine, DOID, SYMP, MeSH, Ontology Modeling, Ontology Engineering, Ontologies Alignment, Semantic Technology, Expert Systems.
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