From Knowledge Import to Knowledge Finishing: Automatic Acquisition and Semi-Automatic Refinement of Medical Knowledge

We describe a two-step ontology engineering methodology by which anatomical knowledge is, first, extracted from comprehensive, though semantically underspecified medical terminologies and then automatically converted into a formally solid description logics format. In the course of this conversion process, particular attention is being paid to the proper representation of partonomies. These constitute a crucial portion of medical knowledge, together with generalization-based taxonomies. In the second step, we further refine the extracted knowledge pieces during interactive editing cycles in order to eliminate specification gaps and inconsistencies.