An Ontological Approach for Understanding Animal Diseases and Their Symptoms

Abstract

The accurate and timely diagnosis of animal diseases is essential for the health and well-being of animals, as well as for the prevention and control of disease outbreaks. One important aspect of disease diagnosis is the accurate representation and classification of diseases and their associated symptoms. The currently available ontologies explain either disease or symptom, but they do not provide a descriptive relationship between symptoms and their diseases. Furthermore, combining two separate ontologies is difficult due to a lack of domain knowledge and the different ontological structures used in different ontologies. As far as we know there isn’t any linked ontology knowledge base that can meet our needs. To address these challenges, we developed a novel animal disease and symptom ontology that aims to provide a descriptive representation of animal diseases and their symptom. Include synonyms for each symptom that motivate to disambiguate and identify the precise symptoms from the ontology. In the end, we were able to achieve an overall implementation accuracy of 83.8%. In addition to this, we make use of the structured methodology of the ontological knowledgebase, which provides researchers with the ability to broaden the ontology to include diseases and symptoms.