Bidirectional Spreading Activation Method for Finding Human Diseases Relatedness Using Well-Formed Disease Ontology

The successful application of semantic web in medical informatics and the fast expanding of biomedical knowledge have prompted to the requirement for a standardized representation of knowledge and an efficient algorithm for querying this extensive information. Spreading activation algorithm is suitable to work on incomplete and large datasets. This article presents a method called SAOO (Spreading Activation over Ontology) which identifies the relatedness between two human diseases by applying spreading activation algorithm based on bidirectional search technique over large disease ontology. The proposed methodology is divided into two phases: Semantic matching and Disease relatedness detection. In Semantic Matching, semantically identify diseases in user's query in the ontology. In the Disease Relatedness Detection, URIs of the diseases are passed to the relatedness detector which returns the set of diseases that may connect them. The proposed method improves the non-semantic medical systems by considering semantic domain knowledge to infer diseases relatedness.