Review of biomedical knowledge and data representation with conceptual graphs

• Published in: Methods of information in medicine Vol. 37; no. 1; p. 86
• Main Authors: Volot, F, Joubert, M, Fieschi, M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Germany 01-01-1998
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Classification; Humans; Information Storage and Retrieval; Medical Informatics Applications; Natural Language Processing; User-Computer Interface
• ISSN: 0026-1270
• DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634504

The basis of conceptual graphs theory is an ontology of types of concepts. Concepts issued from the ontology are interlinked by semantic relationships and constitute canonical conceptual graphs. Canonical graphs may be combined to derive new conceptual graphs by means of formation rules. This formalism allows to separate knowledge representation into a conceptual level and a domain-dependent level, and enables to share and reuse a representation. This paper presents conceptual graph applications to biomedical data and concept representation, classification systems, information retrieval, and natural language understanding and processing. A discussion on the unifying role conceptual graphs theory plays in the implementation of knowledge-based systems is also presented.