Supporting better treatments for meeting health consumers' needs: extracting semantics in social data for representing a consumer health ontology

Introduction. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for building a consumer health ontology using social tags. This would assist health users when they are accessing health information and increase the number of documents relevant to their needs. Methods. In order to extract concepts from social tags, this study conducted an empirical study on terms collected from a social networking site. The semantics of tags were analyzed and a concept list was developed by using the middle-out strategy. Analysis. This study analysed the semantic values of tags by employing Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). This is a method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by analyzing relationships between documents and the terms they contain and word semantics. Results. The process of building an ontology using social tags shows how using this consumer health ontology could improve user access and retrieval. It demonstrates how terms extracted from tags are related to each other with similarity and relationships within hierarches in the ontology. Conclusion. The study has implications for better design of ontology applications that support the search for healthrelated resources. This will enhance the communication between health consumers and professionals.