An Ontology Model for Medical Tourism Supply Chain Knowledge Representation

Abstract

This study developed an application ontology related to the medical tourism supply chain domain (MTSC). The motivation for developing an ontology is that current MTSC studies use a descriptive approach to provide knowledge, which is difficult to comprehend and apply. The formalization of MTSC knowledge can provide medical tourism stakeholders with a shared understanding of the medical tourism business. As a result, the MTSC domain requires efficient semantic knowledge representation. Ontology is a popular approach for integrating knowledge and comprehension because it presents schema and knowledge base in an accurate and relevant feature. This paper employed the ontology engineering methodology, which included specification, conceptualization, and implementation steps. The conceptual model and facets of the MTSC are proposed. The MTSC objective and scope are tested with semantic competency questions against SPARQL Query formulations. The ontology metrics evaluation was used to verify the ontology quality including the external validation done by the domain experts. The results showed that the MTSC ontology has an appropriate schema design, terminologies, and query results.