Lean Six Sigma Roadmap for Quality Assurance of Biomedical Ontologies

The purpose of this article is to introduce the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) roadmap for quality assurance in biomedical ontologies, by applying Lean Six Sigma principles to Ontology Engineering and Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration lies at the human core of social processes and interactions, where a shared goal is what participants join efforts to achieve; therefore, combining Collaboration Engineering and LSS, and, specifically, the DMAIC route which structures each LSS project aims at creating an applicable standard for quality assurance. That will help establish effective biomedical interfunctional databases that can help to improve health care processes, answering the need to reduce the amount of human errors associated with inefficient health care processes. The research idea suggested within this paper aims at developing ontologies that are functional to meet health care needs, by ensuring data collection reliability, by creating a common language to speak with data, and by promoting a shared culture of process optimization and cost effectiveness. Semantic approaches for Collaboration Engineering have been debated in previous works, where a new ontology-based approach has been suggested, where collaboration knowledge is collected, managed and shared by connecting each concept of an ontology to a more detailed collaboration step or a resource, by applying LSS principles. The originality of this article lies in introducing LSS DMAIC as an effective and efficient scientific methodology to query and feed ontologies, and as a tool for quality assurance, which meets the need for shared knowledge, providing solutions to interfunctional problems applying to people with different competences.