(517k) The Pope Ontology for Pharmaceutical Product Development

The development of a pharmaceutical product requires the collection of information during preformulation studies, product formulation, process development, scaleup and manufacturing [1].A large amount of information of different types, ranging from raw data to lab reports to sophisticated math models, has to be shared, utilized and modified by humans for decision making. This functionality makes necessary an informatics infrastructure which supports different activities by streamlining information gathering, data integration, model development and decision making [2]. The foundation of such an infrastructure is the explicitly and formally modeled information, called an ontology [3].

In this work, the Purdue Ontology for Pharmaceutical Engineering is presented. Information is captured in the form of concepts and the relations between concepts. The ontology is centered around the concepts of materials, experiments and properties and builds on previous work [4]. Through the definition of the ontology, several functions that are difficult to perform like complicated searches, association storage and reasoning are made available. In addition, one may use the ontology to interface with software tools for mathematical knowledge modeling as well as with guideline knowledge systems for product development [2]. The application may be applied to other chemical engineering domains like the food and speciality chemical industries.

References

1. Beringer P., DerMarderosian A. Felton, L. et al (2006) Remington: The science and practice of pharmacy 21st Edition, Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, University of the sciences, Philadelphia 2006

2. Venkatasubramanian V, Zhao C, Joglekar G, Jain A, Hailemariam L, Suresh P, Akkisetty V, Morris K and Reklaitis GV (2006) Ontological Informatics Infrastructure for chemical product design and process development, Computers and Chemical Engineering, CPC 7 Special Issue, 30(10-12), 1482-1496

3. Gruber, T. R. (1993) A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specification, Knowledge Acquisition, 5, 2, 199

4. Yang A and Marquardt W (2004) An Ontology-based Approach to Conceptual Process Modelling In: A. Barbarosa-Póvoa, H. Matos (Eds.): European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering -14, 1159-1164