Abstracto
- The volume of biomedical spatial information available on line increases day by day, need to be exploited and shared by users in different knowledge areas. Although classical information retrieval techniques are efficient, they are not appropriate enough, and that is why in recent years the scientific community has focused on creating new semantic-based approaches to answer users’ queries. In this article the problem of chronic noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) is addressed based on Semantic Web ontologies. NCDs, according WHO, cause 36 million deaths annually affecting any gender and age groups worldwide. Moreover, tobacco and alcohol addictions, physical inactivity and unhealthy diets represent major risk factors. Considering the seriousness of the problem globally, there are already underway government strategies to reduce risk factors and early detection and timely treatment. In particular, we propose an ontologies system for knowledge generation of patterns associated with lifestyle in NCDs. The system consists of the following ontologies: GeoOntoMex, HealthOntoMex, NutritionalOntoMex, PhysicalActivityOntoMex, OntoENTRiskFactors and OntoMedHistory. Also, the system of ontologies provides relevant information on time usage, food and tobacco-alcohol consumption and demographics aspects as lifestyle key dimensions. Furthermore, the system will facilitate the integration of data from different domains for decision making about lifestyle transformation.