OWL Ontology for Solar UV Exposure and Human Health

Various knowledge systems represent information in different ways, which may be easy to read and utilize for humans even though it is time consuming. Some systems represent knowledge in their code making it difficult to port and share, though they can perform reasoning tasks effectively. Conversely the Semantic Web is geared towards making this knowledge shareable for creating a global interlinked knowledge source with reasoning capabilities, to cater for humans and agents. The work described in this chapter is one step in the direction of the Semantic Web to show how knowledge can be consistently represented and utilized. Protege along with description logic helps to create consistent Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies and perform reasoning from the represented domain knowledge. This chapter illustrates the use of Protege to create an OWL ontology for Solar UV rays and their effects on humans. This ontology represents information about UV rays effects on humans, factors influencing such effects, and protective measures against UV. Our work takes this a step further to show how reasoning tasks can be performed by inferring the knowledge represented to determine the risk level of a person from UV rays effects. We also discuss how this ontology and others similar can be useful in the Semantic Web endeavor.