Visual Representation of African Traditional Medicine Recipes Using Icons and a Formal Ontology, ontoMEDTRAD

Abstract

In traditional West African medicine, most practitioners are illiterate for official languages. 1127 local languages exist in this region. The transmission of knowledge in this traditional medicine is notoriously oral. In order to enable practitioners to communicate and preserve this knowledge, we are building SysMEDTRAD, a traditional medicine management system, based on a formal ontology of traditional medicine called ontoMEDTRAD. To overcome the language and illiteracy barriers, we propose to combine realistic photographs of plants with formal iconic descriptions of plants and recipes. This paper presents the formal and automatized representation of traditional African medicine recipes.