Integrating descriptive, functional and cooperative aspects in a domain ontology to computerize home care charts

To coordinate themselves, home care (HC) professionals use artifacts to keep a mutual understanding on their common activity: lightly structured charts written in natural language. Instead of trying to define a record to capture them, we want to focus on efficient indexing of this information. The use of a Domain Ontology was proposed. This paper explains how we built and implemented it. Three complementary aspects of the HC charts were analyzed (i) functional aspects performed with precise analyses of actual charts; (ii) interoperability aspects with the use of some HL7-RIM standardized descriptions; and (iii) cooperative aspects, with the integration of a cooperation model. We proposed a Domain Ontology to represent the concepts and the relations used in the charts. The implementation was done with Protégé; the ontology was built in OWL-DL. The IAnnotate application helps us to index the HC chart with the domain ontology. The next step of the work will use the ontology to reason about the different items of information contained in the charts so that contextual use of them should be envisaged.