Evaluation and visualization of healthcare semantic models

What is it about?

Today, the popularity of semantic models and ontologies is increasing rapidly. This leads not only to the high number of general ontologies, but also to a variety of domain-specific ontologies where the medical or healthcare domains play a major role. Their increasing popularity, particularly in different non-IT domains, has an impact on the need for support tools such as visualization. However, what are the benefits of ontology visualization? And how to choose not only the most suitable ontology, but also its visualization and evaluate its suitability for a given case? whether the “silver bullet” exists? and whether they are well suited to non-IT experts? Ontology itself is relatively complex concept that requires a special set of expertise to involve and maintain it. This chapter focuses on the current visualization techniques that make it easier to understand and process health-care data with a focus on the biomedical subdomain. The chapter should allow researchers and practitioners to understand the purposes and priorities of existing techniques by establishing support to choose the most appropriate depending on a use-case.

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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Today, the popularity of semantic models and ontologies is increasing rapidly. This leads not only to the high number of general ontologies, but also to a variety of domain-specific ontologies where the medical or healthcare domains play a major role. Their increasing popularity, particularly in different non-IT domains, has an impact on the need for support tools such as visualization. However, what are the benefits of ontology visualization? And how to choose not only the most suitable ontology, but also its visualization and evaluate its suitability for a given case? whether the “silver bullet” exists? and whether they are well suited to non-IT experts? Ontology itself is relatively complex concept that requires a special set of expertise to involve and maintain it. This chapter focuses on the current visualization techniques that make it easier to understand and process health-care data with a focus on the biomedical subdomain. The chapter should allow researchers and practitioners to understand the purposes and priorities of existing techniques by establishing support to choose the most appropriate depending on a use-case.