Structuring an event ontology for disease outbreak detection

Background: This paper describes the design of an event ontology being developed for application in the machine understanding of infectious disease-related events reported in natural language text. This event ontology is designed to support timely detection of disease outbreaks and rapid judgment of their alerting status by 1) bridging a gap between layman's language used in disease outbreak reports and public health experts' deep knowledge, and 2) making multi-lingual information available. Construction and content: This event ontology integrates a model of experts' knowledge for disease surveillance, and at the same time sets of linguistic expressions which denote diseaserelated events, and formal definitions of events. In this ontology, rather general event classes, which are suitable for application to language-oriented tasks such as recognition of event expressions, are placed on the upper-level, and more specific events of the experts' interest are in the low...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Ai Kawazoe, Hutchatai Chanlekha, Mika Shigematsu, Nigel Collier
• Keywords: Alerting Status, BMCBI 2008, Disease Outbreaks, Ontology