Inflammation ontology design pattern: an exercise in building a core biomedical ontology with descriptions and situations.

Formal ontology has proved to be an extremely useful tool for negotiating intended meaning, for building explicit, formal data sheets, and for the discovery of novel views on existing data structures. This paper describes an example of application of formal ontological methods to the creation of biomedical ontologies. Addressed here is the ambiguous notion of inflammation, which spans across multiple linguistic meanings, multiple layers of reality, and multiple details of granularity.

Coping with medical polysemy in the semantic web: the role of ontologies.

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon by which a term has more than one meaning. It is not a negligible issue in information management, since an effective and unambiguous sharing of the semantic content of data among different databases or knowledge repositories is needed. The paper illustrates a case of polysemy (concerning inflammation), and puts it within the framework provided by the DOLCE+ foundational ontology.