CNTRO 2.0: A Harmonized Semantic Web Ontology for Temporal Relation Inferencing in Clinical Narratives

The Clinical Narrative Temporal Relation Ontology (CNTRO) has been developed for the purpose of allowing temporal information of clinical data to be semantically annotated and queried, and using inference to expose new temporal features and relations based on the semantic assertions and definitions of the temporal aspects in the ontology. While CNTRO provides a formal semantic foundation to leverage the semantic-web techniques, it is still necessary to arrive at a shared set of semantics and operational rules with commonly used ontologies for the time domain. This paper introduces CNTRO 2.0, which tries to harmonize CNTRO 1.0 and a list of existing time ontologies or top-level ontologies into a unified model-an OWL based ontology of temporal relations for clinical research.