The HealthAgents ontology: knowledge representation in a distributed decision support system for brain tumours

In this paper we present our experience of representing the knowledge behind HealthAgents, a distributed decision support system for brain tumour diagnosis. Our initial motivation came from the distributed nature of the information involved in the system and has been enriched by clinicians’ requirements and data access restrictions. We present in detail the steps we have taken towards building our ontology starting from knowledge acquisition to data access and reasoning. We motivate our representational choices and show our results using domain examples employed by clinical partners in HealthAgents.