A Description Logic Based Schema for the Classification of Medical Data
Ian Horrocks, Alan L. Rector, Carole Goble, Franz Baader, Martin Buchheit, Manfred A. Jeusfeld, Werner Nutt · 1996
. The European Galen project aims to promote the sharing and re-use of medical data by providing a concept model which can be used by application designers as a flexible and extensible classification schema. A description logic style terminological knowledge representation system called Grail has been developed specifically for this task. Using a description logic based schema has a number of important benefits including coherence checking, schema enrichment and query optimisation. In order to support a variety of design requirements Grail includes transitive closure of roles and general concept inclusions. Replacing the Grail classifier's existing structural subsumption algorithm with a sound, provably complete and decidable tableaux calculus based algorithm would have many attractions if the intractability problem could be mitigated by suitable optimisations. The optimisation of non-deterministic constraint expansion would be of particular importance as large numbers of these const...