Domain-Specific Concepts and Ontological Reduction within a Data Dictionary Framework

This paper describes a new method for the ontologically based standardization of concepts in the medical domain. As an application of this method we developed a data dictionary which firstly focused on trial-specific context-dependent concepts and relations. The data dictionary has been provided to different medical research networks via the internet by means of the software tool Onto-Builder. It is based on an architecture which includes terminologies, domain-specific ontologies and the top-level categories of GOL. According to our approach top-level concepts are used to build definitions of domain-specific concepts on a firm ground through the process of ontological reduction, which is currently under development and the main ideas of which are outlined in this paper.