An ontology-driven search module for accessing chronic pathology literature

This paper presents an advanced search module for bibliography retrieval developed within the CHRONIOUS European IP project. The developed search module is specifically targeted to clinicians and healthcare practitioners searching for documents related to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). To this aim, the presented tool exploits two pathology-specific ontologies that allow focused document indexing and retrieval. Besides the search module, an enrichment tool is provided to maintain and to keep up-to date such as ontologies. In addition link with the terms of the MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) thesaurus has been provided to guarantee the coverage with the general certified medical terms and multilingual capabilities.