Harnessing ontologies for argument-based decision-making in breast cancer

We introduce a novel Ontology-based Argumentation Framework (OAF) that links a logic-based argumentation formalism and description logic ontologies. We show how these two formalisms can be tightly coupled by observing a few simple restrictions, and provides features not available in either formalism alone. Our work is evaluated in a large case study on decision-making in treatment choice in breast cancer where rules are developed from the results of published clinical trials, and we present a small subset of this to demonstrate the use of the system. We show that OAF provides five advantages: (1) facilitating the clear use of shared definitions between multiple authors; (2) enabling us to match terms in the ontology and rules with those in the specific domain literature; (3) providing a close fit between structure of clinical trials and the structure of our rules; (4) delivering significant economies in the size of the rule-base compared to existing approaches; (5) allowing us take advantage of developments in both ontological and argumentative approaches. We also demonstrate that even a restricted language such as ours is sufficient to capture enough information to generate arguments that are useful for clinical practice. An early prototype implementation is available.