Coping with Medical Polysemy in the Semantic Web: the Role of Ontologies

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon by which a term has more than one meaning. It is not a negligible issue in information management, since an effective and unambiguous sharing of the semantic content of data among different databases or knowledge repositories is needed. The paper illustrates a case of polysemy (concerning inflammation), and puts it within the framework provided by the DOLCE+ foundational ontology. This solution enables us to formally represent several senses of inflammation, and their interrelationships. This we take as a demonstration of how ontologies play an essential role in providing precisely the conceptual foundations that are needed in order to make the intended meaning of natural language expressions available to all the (artificial or human) agents that could be involved in the semantic web