An Examination of OWL and the Requirements of a Large Health Care Terminology

This paper presents a brief initial look at some of the possible benefits and barriers to using OWL as the language for the development, dissemination and implementation of terminological knowledge in the domain of health and health care. In particular, this assessment is made from the perspective of the author’s role in the development of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED). To date, SNOMED has developed and adopted its own special-purpose syntax and formats for terminology development, exchange and distribution. Its representation language has limited expressivity yet is not expressible by any dialect of OWL 1.0. With the evolution to OWL 1.1, the barriers to using OWL for knowledge representation have been resolved. However, partly because of SNOMED’s very large size, there remain barriers to adoption of OWL XML/RDF for SNOMED development, distribution or exchange purposes.