# Healthcare Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Analytics: A Review and Proposed Framework
## 3 AI Applications
### Ontologies and Semantic Reasoning  
An ontology as defined by [PERSON] is an explicit specification of a conceptualization [31]. It refers to an engineering artifact made up of a specific vocabulary describing a certain reality using a set of explicit assumptions regarding the intended meaning of the vocabulary words. With the explosion of data, the number of sources, and their heterogeneity, the concept of ontology has become a very important field of research. Medicine has been one of the preferred fields of experimentation for ontologies due to the tremendous progress in this domain. The interoperability and reusability are two of the main criteria that these ontologies must satisfy. They are designed and shared by the scientific community through four main resources: (i) the OBOFoundry ([[http://www.obofoundry.org/](http://www.obofoundry.org/)]([http://www.obofoundry.org/](http://www.obofoundry.org/))) whose objective is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies that are both well-formed and scientifically accurate. It holds 175 ontologies (as of May 2020) covering, among others, diseases, diagnosis, treatment, anatomy, etc. ; (ii) the BioPortal [32], that aims to create software and support services for the application of ontologies in biomedical science. It holds 1016 (as of May 2020) ontologies and is run by the NIH National Center for Biomedical Ontology; (iii) the Ontology Look-up Service ([[https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/index](https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/index)]([https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/index](https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols/index))) that is a repository of biomedical ontologies. It holds 237 (as of September 2019) ontologies and aims to provide means to find, query, and navigate biomedical ontologies and controlled vocabularies; (iv) UMLS ([[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html)]([https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/index.html))). The developed ontologies cover diagnosis and treatment of multiple diseases such as diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's, hypertension, asthma, etc. They also represent drug, cell, phenotype, radiology, anatomy, chemical, infectious diseases, clinical search, psychology, nursing, laboratory, units of measurement, mass spectrometry, epigenetic, biology system, etc. Very recently, COVID-19 was integrated in Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) that provides all aspects of the infectious disease domain [33]. In [34], the authors devised the role of ontologies in bioresearch in general, either biological or biomedical. They showed interesting results from a functional perspective. The interest of the article resides in the description of different aspects of ontologies in biological and biomedical domains. Four main features are generally present in almost all ontologies, and when combined they play an important role in the success of ontologies: provision of standard identifiers for classes and relations that represent the phenomena within a domain; provision of a vocabulary for a domain; provision of metadata that describes the intended meaning of the classes and relations in ontologies; provision of machine-readable axioms and definitions that enable computational access to some aspects of the meaning of classes and relations. A functional perspective on ontologies in biology and biomedicine is provided by the authors with a special focus on what ontologies can do and describing how they can be used in support of integrative research. They also outlined perspectives for using ontologies in data-driven science, their application in structured data mining and machine learning applications. According to [35], in the past decade in some east Asian countries, air pollution became a serious threat to public health. In Taiwan, pollution and related illnesses became a serious problem, where sore throat, asthma, bronchitis, sinusitis, laryngitis, etc., are some of the common symptoms and illnesses.