A Lexical-Ontological Resource for Consumer Heathcare

In Consumer Healthcare Informatics it is still difficult for laypersons to understand and act on health information, due to the persistent communication gap between specialized medical terminology and that used by healthcare consumers. Furthermore, existing clinicallyoriented terminologies cannot provide sufficient support when integrated into consumer-oriented applications, so there is a need to create consumerfriendly terminologies reflecting the different ways healthcare consumers express and think about health topics. Following this direction, this work suggests a way to support the design of an ontology-based system that mitigates this gap, using knowledge engineering and Semantic Web technologies. The system is based on the development of a consumer-oriented medical terminology which will be integrated with other existing domain ontologies/terminologies into a medical ontology repository. This will support consumer-oriented healthcare systems by providing many knowledge services to help users in accessing and managing their healthcare data.