Semantic Profile

Semantic Profile is an OWL file which encapsulates patient details as entered by the patient, nurse and doctor. This file is initially generated as soon as the patient submits the questionnaire.

Later, the same is updated by the Clinic officials (e.g., nurse) and finally, by one or more doctors. The structure (schema) of the semantic profile follows from AnsweredQuestionnaire ontology and Patient ontology. So, even though it is an independent OWL file, it can be considered as an instance of AnsweredQuestionnaire ontology and Patient ontology. The former is initially created by the application, and the latter is automatically generated from the former by using OWL2 feature called Property Insertion.

3.3 Ontology Reasoning

Reasoners are application

There are two main strategies of reasoning, forward chaining and backward chaining [Giarratano et.al.

2004]. Forward chaining starts from existing facts and applying rules to derive all possible facts while backward chaining starts with the desired conclusion and perform backward to find

supporting facts. Optimized algorithms and techniques may be used to improve the performance of the reasoning process. User applications typically interact with inference engines via APIs

(application programming interfaces). These APIs normally support selecting reasoning strategies, features, and operations, storing facts and querying the result data from the knowledge base, etc.

We have adopted the forward chaining strategy in OntoDiabtetic reasoning (Fig 8). Rules are applied to the asserted facts, and the entailed statements are immediately added to the knowledge base until it reaches the conclusion (inferred fact). The f orward chaining algorithm is given below :-

Step 1: Let ‘f’ be a fact that is to be added to the knowledge base.

Step 2: Find all implications ‘I’ that have ‘f’ as a premise.

Step

2013 ] . Rules give an additional level of expressivity that cannot be offered by web ontology languages (OWL). It enhances the ontology language by allowing one to describe relations that cannot be described using description logic used in OWL

[Rattanasawad et.al. 2013]. The rule language also allows sharing and reuse of existing rules between different systems. OWL ontology is extended using rules. OWL 2 reasoners such as

Pellet and HermiT can be used to reason over such ontologies extended using these rules.

In semantic web, a rule is expressed in the form of If-then statements containing logical functions and operations. A rule consists of an antecedent (body of the rule) and a consequent (head of the rule). The antecedent contains conditions combined using logical operators while the consequent part contains conclusions. If the rule statement(s) are true, new knowledge is added to the knowledge base. Informally, the rule can be read as: if the body is true, then the head must be true [Birte et.al. 2009]. These rules can be defined in different rule languages or