Abstract

Due to the numerous health documents available on the Web, information retrieval remains problematic with existing tools. This paper is positioned within the context of the CISMeF project (acronym of Catalogue and Index of French-speaking Medical Sites) and of a future Semantic Web. In CISMeF the resources are described using a set of metadata based on a structured terminology which “encapsulates ” the MeSH thesaurus in its French version. Now, the objective is to migrate the CISMeF terminology, and thus the MeSH thesaurus, to a formal ontology, so as to get a more powerful search tool. The paper presents the very first stage and results of this ongoing project, aiming at migrating the MeSH to OWL. It reports on the first steps, which have presently been done, concerning the automatic transformation of the terminology into OWL-DL. First, the CISMeF terminology has been “formalized ” in OWL. Then, the resulting OWL “ontology ” has been imported under the Protégé editor which makes possible to check its consistency and its classification in using Racer. Finally, the paper concludes on the current results and encountered difficulties, and gives future work perspectives.

Citations