Personal Health Ontology: towards the interoperation of e-health tools

Patient-centred healthcare subscribes to the belief that the patient has strengths, values and experiences that are important in the healthcare experience and relationship between those providing care and the patient. It requires patients to have the ability to obtain and understand health information, and make appropriate health decisions. The main problem here is that though the e-health applications provide patients and consumer with access to health information, each application is still individually used and the used and produced information remains within each system. In this paper, we present our work on developing a Personal Health Server, which allows the interoperation of e-health tools through the shared ontology. The ontology is developed by integrating the ontologies of the e-health tools, which support personal health records, e-health oriented blogs and information therapy. Technically the Personal Health Server is based on knowledge management technologies, and it is easily extensible to capture additional e-health tools.