Design principles of DOLCE-based formal representation of ICD10.

The authors present the framework of formal representation of ICD10 based on DOLCE. The goal of the work is to represent the meaning of the categories of the classification systems based on a formal top-level ontology. The ICD categories are described in the space of atomic disease concepts, while the diseases themselves are defined on a pathological basis. The anatomical entities are taken from FMA, functions, morphological abnormalities and procedures from SNOMED International, while organisms are taken form the biological taxonomy. The ontology is represented in OWL 1.0 in a modularised way. The transformation of the previous GALEN-based representation to the same conceptual system is also under way.