Development of Upper Domain Ontologies for Knowledge Preservation of Unani Medicines

Observing the role of traditional medicines in global healthcare, World Health Organization signifies the need to preserve knowledge of this valuable intellectual property which is being lost or inaccessible, as it is either undocumented or local in context. Unani medicines, a 2500 years old system, has been practiced in Asia, is facing the same situation. Little computerization effort has been done so far earlier in this domain. To preserve the knowledge of Unani medicines, a formal semantic structure is required that is machine readable and reusable. This paper defines a conceptual structure of Unani medicines using upper domain ontology that includes core philosophy, diseases, diagnosis, symptoms, drugs, and treatment of patients. Developed in Protégé, designers have no past experience in ontology development; information collected from books and expert interviews. The proposed ontology serves as a backbone in upcoming knowledge management framework of Unani medicines.