Design and Development of an Ontology for Multiple Sclerosis

In the context of the BRAINTEASER European healthcare project, this thesis designs and develops an ontology for modelling knowledge in the domain area of multiple sclerosis. An ontology can be seen as a set of representational primitives that permits us to specify concepts, relationships, and logical axioms that are relevant for modelling a do- main of specific knowledge. The overall objective is to promote open science by sharing clinical data from different hospitals as Linked Open Data (LOD). The main technologies exploited in this thesis are Re- source Description Framework (RDF), which is the standard de-facto for publishing data in LOD environment, and OWL2 - Web Ontology Language which is the current language for defining ontologies. Moreover, the work presents also the design and development of a soft- ware data mapper that automatically map clinical data into an RDF graph compliant with the schema defined by the ontology.