The potential of ontologies to improve surveillance in resource-constrained environments was highlighted by members linked to this group at the 15th meeting of the International Society for Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics (ISVEE-15) in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This meeting, which takes place every three years, is arguably the largest global gathering of veterinary epidemiologists and related researchers. This year’s theme was, “Learning & Sharing Today, Building Better Animal & Human Health Tomorrow”.
On the first day of the conference our colleague Laura Skippen presented a talk entitled, “Improving animal healthcare decision-making in Ethiopian paraprofessionals using a smartphone application”. This application is currently being expanded to deal with a much wider set of animal species and diseases, as well as languages, and ontologies are being used to support these extensions. Later in the conference a poster was presented which provided additional details as to how this ontology-based support was being delivered as part of the Differential Disease Diagnosis Framework (D3F). Use this link to download the poster, Using ontologies to create open source smartphone-based differential disease diagnosis and reporting tools for animals in rural settings, for more details.