In this weeks SQUARE talk, Sehar will tell us about constructing and validating an ontology for COVID-19.
SPEAKER: Sehar Shafique, PhD. fellow at ITU.
ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has generated an unprecedented volume of unstructured biomedical research data, creating a critical need for formal knowledge representation frameworks that can organize and standardize this information for easier access and reuse.
In this talk, I will introduce a domain ontology for COVID-19, developed using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) within the Protégé ontology engineering environment. The ontology captures formal definitions, synonyms, and semantic relationships across key biomedical entities including symptoms, mechanisms, and associated terminology. Logical consistency was verified using an OWL reasoner, and the ontology underwent rigorous validation by a team of medical doctors through structured interviews and surveys, confirming its clinical accuracy and conceptual consistency. A live web portal was also developed, allowing users to search and browse the structured COVID-19 knowledge base through an accessible interface.