Design and Development of an Ontology for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a degenerative disease that affects the nervous system, causing a progressive deterioration in the quality of life of affected patients. The European project Brainteaser leverages the value of Big Data, including health, lifestyle and environmental data, and Artificial Intelligence tools in order to deliver algorithms capable of predicting the progression of such disease. Since Brainteaser adopts an open-science approach and considering the trend in this field to use ontologies, i.e. models of formal representation of knowledge, the need to develop an ontology for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis emerged. Based on this need, in this thesis we will present the design and development of an ontology to model clinical data for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. In addition, we will also present the development of a Data Mapper: a software that aims to map clinical data on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in an RDF (Resource Description Framework) dataset according to the ontology developed.