Journal of Modern Medical

Introduction
Various knowledge organization systems have been developed over time to represent the knowledge of medicine in the Islamic era, and each has presented concepts in this field from a specific perspective. Knowledge organization systems refer to systems that provide an organized interpretation of knowledge structures by presenting concepts and semantic relationships between them. Due to the limited capabilities of previous knowledge organization systems, including thesauruses, in accurately presenting concepts and semantic relationships between them and the need for more precise and richer systems, a new type of knowledge organization system called “ontology” was developed for this purpose. Ontology is a clear and explicit model in the field of knowledge, including a set of concepts and relationships between them. Considering the depth of the concepts of the Islamic medicine and its various branches, as well as the range of semantic relationships between the concepts of this field, it is necessary to use systems such as ontologies that have higher knowledge representation capabilities to depict the conceptual structure of Islamic medicine. This study aims to investigate the importance and necessity of ontology design in the field of the Islamic medicine. 

Methods
In this qualitative study conducted in 2022, the documentary method was used to collect data. A search was conducted for studies published from 2010 to 2022 related to the creation and evaluation of knowledge organization systems (such as thesauruses and ontologies) in the field of Islamic medicine, as well as the ontology design in the field of traditional medicine in in national and international databases including ResearchGate, PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar, and ISC using the keywords Traditional Medicine, Islamic Traditional Medicine, Iranian Traditional Medicine and Persian Medicine in combination with the keywords “Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS)”, “Thesaurus” and “Ontology”. Twenty eligible studies were finally selected and reviewed to investigate the importance and necessity of designing and creating new knowledge organization systems, especially ontologies and their benefits.

Results
By disambiguating relationships and dealing with different aspects of a domain, ontologies present all kinds of dependencies in a completely accurate, clear and comprehensive manner. ontologies add other elements such as attributes and their values to relations. Ontologies provide the possibility of determining semantic relationships in specialized fields in a very detailed and precise manner and are superior to other types of knowledge organization systems in terms of abstraction level, semantic coverage, representation of various types of relationships between concepts, and machine processing capability. Due to the use of a defined standard language, it is possible to edit and update the ontology and reuse the collected knowledge easily.
Ontologies are designed in different ways, including the use of existing knowledge of previous knowledge organization systems, such as thesauruses. The thesaurus is considered a suitable source for developing an ontology due to its semantic information and the hierarchical structure of concepts, the richness of the definitions of terms, the existence of relationships between terms, and the consensus resulting from their extensive use in libraries. In general, the Islamic medicine is full of diverse terms and all kinds of equivalent and hierarchy relations and dependency between terms.
 
Conclusion
It seems that ontology is a suitable tool for comprehensively and accurately describing the Islamic medicine knowledge, and the existence of tools such as the Islamic medicine thesaurus facilitates the creation of ontology in this field as a new semantic web system. Ontology design is one of the most efficient methods to describe the meaning of knowledge in the field of Islamic medicine and provides the possibility of protecting and reusing this valuable knowledge. The development of ontologies can be the basis for presenting other informatics applications in this field. On the other hand, the importance of using Semantic Web technologies and aligning with global developments raises the necessity of designing ontologies.

Ethical Considerations
Compliance with ethical guidelines
In this study, no experiments on human or animal samples were done. Therefore, there was no need for ethical considerations.

Funding
This article was extracted from a research project and funded by the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences. 

Conflicts of interest
The authors declared no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to express her gratitude to Dr. Mohagheghi (Vice-Chancellor for Research of the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences) and Mr. Ghasemlou for their support and assistance.

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