A Knowledge Management System developed for supporting creation, capture, storage and dissemination of information about Epilepsy and Epileptic Seizures is presented. We present an Ontology on Epilepsy and a Web-based prototype that together create the KMS.
The use of ontologies in the area of medical science has already a long way, and
several Web references to medical ontologies for different areas of medicine can be
found (UMLS [
This project starts out the foundation for an open Ontology to represent knowledge
about epilepsy and epileptic seizures and to build a system to store and manage the
ontology so it can be evolved. Doctors, patients and researchers will have an easy
access to complete and well-structured information on epilepsy and epileptic seizures
and with their contributions may extend and build the most complete ontology on the
subject. This work is part of the European project EPILEPSIAE [
The developed base structure for the domain of epilepsy and epileptic seizures is
based on the proposed diagnostic scheme for people with epileptic seizures and
epilepsy by the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) [
The key concepts that make up the epilepsy ontology are the following: • General concepts - all common concepts of epilepsy and that can be used to describe other concepts. • Seizures Types - all kinds of seizures types known to this day, in accordance with the proposed diagnostic scheme for people with epileptic seizures and epilepsy. • Epileptic Syndromes – all known epileptic syndromes according to the proposed diagnostic scheme for people with epileptic seizures and epilepsy. • Electroencephalography – all Electroencephalography related concepts. The ontology has actually 145 concepts, 290 label annotations and 290 comments annotations. Annotations are in English and in Portuguese. Figure 1 shows one view of the epilepsy ontology. 3 Knowledge Management System
The main component in the system is the epilepsy ontology. The prototype developed intends to support the ontology from the point of view of storage, management and search.
The system is composed of five distinct modules: Management, Navigation Exploration, Search, EPILEPSIAE DB and Indexer. The Management, Navigation and Search modules are unified through a Web interface produced in JSP code, Struts2 and JavaScript. The modular architecture schema of the system is presented in Fig. 2.
Management module. The management module is responsible for managing and to maintain the consistency of the ontology.
Search module. The search module is the module responsible for data query in the
ontology. This module is responsible in encapsulating the SPARQL [
EPILEPSIAE DB access module. The EPILEPSIAE DB module access is responsible for the database connection to EPILEPSIAE and extracting text from certain fields present in some tables.
Index module. The index module makes use of the EPILEPSIAE DB access module described previous, in order to collect multiple resources, mostly in free text format, and index it.
Web interface. The Web interface as already mentioned, is the element that links the interaction through the Web browser and the management, navigation and search modules.
Ontology Repository. The Ontology repository is where the Epilepsy ontology is
stored. It is composed of the free version of the AllegroGraph RDFStore [
The prototype developed offers a complete platform for the management of the ontology, allowing to graphically navigate and explore the ontology structure. The search system allows to quickly finding ontology resources, with the possibility of suggestions if no results are found.
It is important to develop more features in relation to the management of
ontologies : loading an ontology from an OWL [
Greater integration between the ontology/system and the EPILEPSIAE [
Because the area of epilepsy and epileptic seizures is constantly evolving, the ontology should reflect this evolution. It is important to continue communicating with medical doctors, so that new concepts are added to the ontology and their respective meaning, and most importantly, try to find new applications for the ontology, serving the patients, doctors and researchers.
The EPILEPSIAE project is developing algorithms and classifiers for seizure prediction, namely based on computational intelligence, such as neural networks and support vector machines, and their results are stored into the database. The ontological search of these classifiers and data will be developed, in order to support the development of seizure predictors for new patients.
Acknowledgements. This work is carried out in the EPILEPSIAE Project, EU FP7 Advanced ICT for Risk Assessment and Patient Safety, Grant 211713. The authors express their gratitude to the EU Commission for the financial support, namely for the scholarship of Pedro Almeida for his MsC thesis.