Forbes et al. present two case studies on the application of ontologies and knowledge-based approaches. The book contains a fairly detailed description of the subject domains and their representation as ontologies that exploit the services of PROTÉGÉ. Two separate domains are discussed: employer demand intelligence (EDI) and patient practitioner assistive communication (PPAC). EDI aims at predicting the demand for workers in healthcare. PPAC is designed for bridging the cultural and linguistic gap between Aboriginal people and healthcare workers and medical doctors in Australia.

Chapter 1 outlines the situation in both areas from societal and management viewpoints. The second chapter contains an extensive survey about the available, most recent technologies including big data analytics, data science, and multiagent technologies. Chapter 3 gives a comprehensive literature survey on ontology engineering. The chapter describes the major methods for analysis and design of subject areas with the purpose of creating an ontology, to define axioms and rules formally. The fourth chapter provides a description of PPAC ontology in the terms of classes, properties (a kind of relationship), and constraints using the tools for representation in PROTÉGÉ. The interesting part of this description of the development is that the major goal of this ontology is to help medical doctors (and other healthcare workers) in the interpretation of language usage of Aboriginal people in the sense of pragmatics and semantics of their “dialects,” or language usage. Chapter 5 shows the high-level architecture of the system that includes the ontology and the knowledge base. A use case scenario is presented as an illustrative example for usefulness of the developed system. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the employer demand ontology (EDO) and the employer demand intelligence tool (EDIT). EDIT carries out text mining and analysis on online job advertisements, then links the discovered elements to the EDO, and inserts instances into the ontology. Through a case study, the processing of texts in web pages and the augmentation of the ontology with new elements are demonstrated. Chapter 8 analyzes the combined application of ontologies along with the multiagent technologies. Briefly, the chapter raises an example of IBM Watson as a cognitive information system, and its published high-level architecture yields guidance for future development direction. The closing chapter discusses the management and administration issues of potential epidemics and the conceivable application of the developed and described systems (EDI, PPAC).

This brief book is interesting for practitioners and researchers working on the development and engineering of ontologies. The examples represented in PROTÉGÉ and OWL may help others develop similar applications. However, the survey of literature and technologies seems superfluous because the intended audience knows very well the methods and technologies belonging to disciplines of artificial intelligence. The system described in the book provides solutions for management and communication problems within healthcare in Australia; the solutions can be considered as thought provoking for other subject domains as well.