Abstract
In order to promote information sharing of electronic medical data, standardization efforts have been made intensively these years. A wide variety of entities included in medical information requires a knowledge infrastructure system of a capability of dealing with semantics of them. In order to provide such a knowledge infrastructure, we have conducted a Japanese medical ontology project and have defined diseases in terms of abnormal states together with an anatomical ontology. In this study, we have developed an abnormality ontology in a three-layer hierarchical structure which provides a flexible representation framework to guarantee consistent representation of various clinical abnormal states. Our ontology is expected to contribute to providing clinical terminologies or standardized vocabularies with a basic backbone for a better understanding of the essentials of abnormal states in diseases and sharing higher level knowledge.
