developing cardiac electrophysiology ontology: moving towards data harmonization and integration

Introduction: cardiac electrophysiology (ep) studies the electrical heart conduction system which is used for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. in this context, a huge amount of data is generated, requiring efficient and effective access, interpretation, and data analysis from multiple sources in a unified view. to resolve this challenge, this paper presents an ontology to reconcile data heterogeneity problems in this domain. material and methods: the cardiac ep ontology was constructed according to the life cycle of ontology building. structural, functional, and expert evaluation was performed to ensure its quality and usability. results: cardiac ep ontology was developed using protégé environment and implemented in owl editing tool. it presented a detailed hierarchical structure of the cardiac ep domain with around 324 instances describing cardiac ep-related concepts. conclusion: cardiac ep ontology provides an explicit formal description of the concepts, relationships, and properties associated with cardiac electrophysiology making seamless data integration between multiple heterogeneous databases. it also is a useful framework for knowledge representation in knowledge-based systems, as well as for explicit communication between experts in the ep domain.