A semantic web model for the situational awareness of indigenous knowledge in healt

Abstract

Most unsupervised indigenous knowledge (IK) are known to be very useful in combating critical health issues as well as being dangerous if the administration is abused. Despite the fact that these locally prepared herbal medicine are not encouraged to be used by the citizenry for known reasons, some people in our localities still use these products and testify to their usefulness. If there is awareness on the true sources of this indigenous knowledge with the dosage not exceeded, these products will be helpful in combating some critical health issues where orthodox medicine fails. It will also be helpful to the citizenry who may not be able to afford orthodox medicine as well as providing a means of livelihood for the traditional medical doctors (herbalists). This work is aimed at creating a computational model for situation awareness of indigenous knowledge in health that will help in information sharing using ontological modeling approach for semantic web. The resulting model will feature and share the successes as well as the challenges and the opportunities of indigenous knowledge in health as obtained by interviewing the traditional experts and the patients that have made use of these traditional products. This situation awareness of IK will help put IK to proper and safe use in handling critical health issues especially for the poor who can’t afford expensive orthodox medicin