Toward the design of a nursing ontology system

The unambiguous and consistent representation of the healthcare domain is the foundation of modernized healthcare (eg, electronic medical records). However, the nursing domain often fails to meet this requirement. In this article, we address this challenge by presenting a three-stage methodological approach that can be used to (1) capture knowledge in a nursing domain; (2) design a nursing ontology, composed of data models linked with terminology concepts in a multirelational property graph; and (3) implement and (4) evaluate the ontology. Through the feasibility, development, and evaluation phases of our methodological approach, we modeled a nursing domain (ontology) and the indices that partition the domain into an efficient, searchable space, where the solution to a nursing problem is seen as abstractly defined traversals through its graph vertices and edges. Thus, the use of the three-phase ontology development process and multirelational property graph was sufficiently comprehensive for achieving the representation of a nursing domain ontology and its instantiation.