An ontology of bacteria to help physicians to compare antibacterial spectra.

General practitioners (GPs) may lack specialist microbiological knowledge, making it difficult for them to use documents concerning antibacterial spectra provided by French health authorities. We have developed a tool to help GPs to compare antibacterial spectra, based on an ontology of bacteria generated using OWL-DL language. This tool makes it possible to search for information concerning the antibiotic susceptibility of given bacteria, regardless of the way in which this information is expressed in the document. Applied to the whole document, the tool made 4528 spectra explicit, whereas only 3471 could be understood without microbiological reasoning. A preliminary study showed that the performance of this tool was similar to that of an expert microbiologist (94 to 98% correct responses) and better than that of unassisted GPs (84-90% correct responses).