Multi-agent ontology-based Web 2.0 platform for medical rehabilitation

Information technologies have played key roles in a wide range of medical settings such as hospital wards, operating rooms, emergency departments, and rehabilitation centers, rendering biomedical knowledge and data more accessible for human comprehension, comparison, analysis and communication. In this context, ontology has been recognized in the bioinformatics literature as a suitable technique for advancing knowledge and data representations in biomedicine. With the enhancement of automated reasoning and graphical visualizations, ontology-technology can assist human comprehensibility as well as mitigating the complexity inherent to this domain. Rehabilitation medicine has become an important part field in medicine, as distinct from preventive medicine, health care medicine and clinical medicine. In this article, we aim to address the ontological and epistemological issues of information services through the example of OntoRis, an ontology-based rehabilitation service OntoRis is designed to assist patients in acquiring actionable knowledge about his/her prescribed rehabilitation, and to expedite recovering through providing suggestions and advice drawn from evidence-based medicine. Moreover, OntoRis can also serve as an interactive learning platform for people who are interested in rehabilitation medicine. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.