Knowledge Management Framework for Emerging Infectious Diseases Preparedness and Response: Design and Development of Public Health Document Ontology

BACKGROUND: There are increasing concerns about our preparedness and timely coordinated response across the globe to cope with emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). This poses practical challenges that require exploiting novel knowledge management approaches effectively. OBJECTIVE: This work aims to develop an ontology-driven knowledge management framework that addresses the existing challenges in sharing and reusing public health knowledge. METHODS: We propose a systems engineering-inspired ontology-driven knowledge management approach. It decomposes public health knowledge into concepts and relations and organizes the elements of knowledge based on the teleological functions. Both knowledge and semantic rules are stored in an ontology and retrieved to answer queries regarding EID preparedness and response. RESULTS: A hybrid concept extraction was implemented in this work. The quality of the ontology was evaluated using the formal evaluation method Ontology Quality Evaluation Framework. CONCLUSIONS: Our approach is a potentially effective methodology for managing public health knowledge. Accuracy and comprehensiveness of the ontology can be improved as more knowledge is stored. In the future, a survey will be conducted to collect queries from public health practitioners. The reasoning capacity of the ontology will be evaluated using the queries and hypothetical outbreaks. We suggest the importance of developing a knowledge sharing standard like the Gene Ontology for the public health domain.