Can an Ad-hoc ontology Beat a Medical Search Engine? The Chronious Search Engine case

Abstract: Chronious is an Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease(COPD) Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and Renal Insufficiency. It consists of several modules: an ontology based literature search engine, a rule based decision support system, remote sensors interacting with lifestyle interfaces (PDA, monitor touch-screen) and a machine learning module. All these modules interact each other to allow the monitoring of two types of chronic diseases and to help clinician in taking decision for care purpose. This paper illustrates how the ontology search engine was created and fed and how some comparative test indicated that the ontology based approach give better results, on some estimation parameters, than the main reference web search engine.