SEMANTIC MODEL AND METHOD TO ADDRESS QUESTIONS TO PROFESSIONALS

Semantic Model Description

This section describes an ontology based semantic model which describes the behaviour of the social network, and the classification system based on a set of concepts and terms represented by a preexisting medical ontology.

We propose the use of OWL (Dean, 2004; Smith, 2004) in order to represent the knowledge of this semantic model. Ontologies can be defined in different ways due to the existence of different languages to represent them. Therefore, it is very important to use mature standards to define them. From this point of view, OWL is the best option. Proposed by the Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it is one of the main elements of the Semantic Web, a project initiated by T. Berners-Lee to include semantic in the Web (Berners-Lee, 2001). OWL is supported by different technologies (XML, XML Schema, RDF (Graham, 2004), RDF Schema (Brickley, 2004), and all together provides a way to define a structure for documents and the explicit semantic relationship between different resources. All these technologies are open standards, tested and accepted.