A proposed ontology for online healthcare surveys

This paper results from the research efforts of the Clinical Informatics Research Group in building a generalized system for online survey implementation. Key to the success of any generalized survey system is a standard ontology for the differing components of any survey, particularly those sought to be implemented online, over the World Wide Web. In this paper, we introduce the need for generalized survey authoring tools, discuss our methods for elucidating the different components present in many healthcare instruments and classifying them as per existing standards, and later present our proposed ontology for online surveys in the healthcare domain. This is followed by a more detailed description of the different question types mentioned in this ontology. Finally, we compare some general purpose authoring systems currently available to determine their flexibility in representing these disparate question types (www.cirg.washington.edu/SuML).