POPULATING AN HIV AND AIDS ONTOLOGY

In this paper we describe the process and methods used in selecting and organising content for an ontology. In the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) field ontology refers to a way of describing concepts showing their relations within a given domain. It is a way of organising and storing information and facilitating interaction between a system and its users. Ontologies are being used more frequently to provide services that deal with complex information. In this paper we describe our experience of developing content of an HIV and AIDS ontology for students at a university in South Africa. Using several different methods, we started the process of selecting and organising HIV and AIDS information, free of scientific jargon and prescriptive language and consisting only of relevant information. For this paper we used a subjective meaning of relevance to refer to HIV and AIDS information that students need and should have. We also chose relevant information to avoid 'information overload'. We focused on five areas of HIV and AIDS, that is, prevention, transmission, testing, treatment and living with HIV. We used data derived from interviews with six HIV and AIDS experts to develop a survey that was open to all students at our university. The 689 students who took the survey indicated that they needed more information on testing, treatment and living with HIV.
Respondents also showed that students had a lot of information on HIV prevention and transmission. Four focus group discussions revealed that students were tired of repetitions of the same basic information on HIV and AIDS and wanted to know more about life after contracting HIV. Using this data, we propose some guidelines to populate an HIV and AIDS ontology. In the paper we show that ontologies can be customized for particular groups of users, for example according to gender, race etc. Another advantage of the ontology is that it can be expanded or contracted depending on the scope of the ontology.