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26th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering

26th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and)Intelligent Information & Engineering
Systems (KES 2022
Systems (KES 2022)

Towards an ontology-based approach to enhance the mobile blood

Towards an ontology-based approach to enhance the mobile blood
collection process
collection process
Ikram Ghernaouta,* , Linda Elmhadhbib, Arkopaul Sarkarc, Sidi Mohamed Meliania,
Ikram Ghernaouta,* , Linda Elmhadhbi
Mohamed, Arkopaul
b
Hedi Karray Sarkar
c c
, Sidi Mohamed Meliania,
Mohamed Hedi Karrayc
Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of Tlemcen (MELT), Algeria
a
b
Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Univ Lyon 2, DISP-UR4570,69621 Villeurbanne, France
a
Manufacturing
c
UniversityEngineering
of Toulouse,Laboratory
INP-ENIT, of Tlemcen
Tarbes (MELT),
65000, Algeria
France
b
Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Univ Lyon 2, DISP-UR4570,69621 Villeurbanne, France
c
University of Toulouse, INP-ENIT, Tarbes 65000, France

Abstract
Abstract
The choice of the best location to install the mobile blood collection center is one of the most significant challenges of the blood
supply chain. To date, there is a strong need to mobilize potential donors and maximize the amount of collected blood in order to
The
meetchoice of the best
the demand. locationthe
However, to traditional
install the mobile
mobile bloodblood collection
collectioncenter is one
process of the most significant
is non-digitalized, and therechallenges
is a hugeofamount
the bloodof
supply chain.that
information Toshould
date, there is a strongtoneed
be considered to mobilize
enhance potential donors
the decision-making and maximize
process. the amount
Understanding of collected
data more blood
effectively is ain
keyorder to
factor
meet
to provide insight in order to support decision makers in choosing the most appropriate site to install the mobile truck in order of
the demand. However, the traditional mobile blood collection process is non-digitalized, and there is a huge amount to
information
target as many thatdonors
shouldasbe considered
possible. to enhanceanthe
Accordingly, decision-making
ontology-based process. Understanding
cyber-physical social systemdata moreiseffectively
(CPSS) is improve
essential to a key factor
the
to provide
mobile insight
blood in order
collection to support
process decision it.
and digitalize makers
In thisinpaper,
choosing the most
we present appropriate
Mobile Blood site to install
Collection the mobile
Ontology truck ina modular
(MBCO), order to
target
suite ofasontologies
many donors thatasformalize
possible. the
Accordingly,
mobile bloodan ontology-based cyber-physical
collection process. social
To do so, we usesystem (CPSS) Ontology
Basic Formal is essential(BFO)
to improve the
as a top-
mobile blood collection process and digitalize it. In this paper, we present Mobile Blood Collection Ontology
level ontology that facilitates the integration of the different ontological modules and also some existing domain ontologies. The(MBCO), a modular
suite of ontologies
proposed ontology that
will formalize
be exploitedthe later
mobilebyblood collectiondecision
a data-driven process.support
To do system
so, we use Basic
to find outFormal Ontology
the best location(BFO)
for theasmobile
a top-
level ontology that facilitates the integration of the different ontological modules and also some existing domain ontologies. The
center.
proposed ontology will be exploited later by a data-driven decision support system to find out the best location for the mobile
center.
© 2022
2022 The
The Authors.
Authors. Published
Published by by ELSEVIER
Elsevier B.V.B.V.
©
This is
This is an
an open-access
open access article
article under
under the
the CC
CC BY-NC-ND
BY-NC-ND license license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
© 2022 The Authors.
Peer-review under Published by of
responsibility ELSEVIER
the B.V.committee of the 26th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and
scientific
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of KES International
This is an ontology,
Intelligent
Keywords: open-access
Information article under
& Engineering
upper-level themobile
ontology, CC BY-NC-ND
Systemsblood(KES license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
2022)
collection.
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of KES International
Keywords: ontology, upper-level ontology, mobile blood collection.

*
Corresponding author.
Email address: ikram.ghernaout@yahoo.com
*
Corresponding author.
Email address: ikram.ghernaout@yahoo.com
1877-0509 © 2022 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
1877-0509 ©under
Peer-review 2022responsibility
The Authors. ofPublished by ELSEVIER
the scientific committeeB.V.
of KES International
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
Peer-review
1877-0509 ©under
2022responsibility
The Authors. of the scientific
Published committee
by Elsevier B.V.of KES International
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)
Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 26th International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent
Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2022)
10.1016/j.procs.2022.09.341
2834 Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842
2 / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2022) 000–000

1. Introduction
The lives of a wide range of people depend strongly on a regular supply of blood products that are generally
provided by voluntary non-remunerated blood donors. Over the past few years, blood demands have been steadily
increasing throughout the entire world. In this regard, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared: "Every country
is tackling a constant challenge of collecting sufficient blood from safe donors to meet national needs". For this reason,
blood transfusion services and centers, across every country, should work collectively and organize more frequent
blood collection and donation campaigns to maintain an adequate and stable supply of blood in order to satisfy the
transfusion needs of all patients. To date, the collected blood is not sufficient enough to meet the growing demands.
In this context, various institutions, in collaboration with blood transfusion services (BTS), often organize mobile
blood donation campaigns. This operation requires large caravans that often must carry different equipment and
devices that enable the blood donation and collection process. These campaigns are generally held at different sites
that are mainly selected for their proximity to populated areas so they can attract potential donors who are not always
available or live in urban areas where there are serious transportation problems. However, organizing successful blood
donation campaigns represents a serious challenge for BTS and institutions. First, the blood collection site must be
appropriately selected and the donation operation ought to be carefully planned by taking into account the weather
conditions and several other factors. In addition, an effective strategy should be implemented in order to target new
and repeated voluntary blood donors. Second, due to the large number of donors arriving at the mobile blood donation
truck at the same time, another important issue should be addressed, it concerns managing the waiting time and putting
in place an adequate plan of actions that allows managing efficiently the arrival of blood donors by providing enough
qualified staff, sufficient space, and suitable products and equipment. Third, the staff of the BTS or institutions do not
always have easy access to donors’ personal data (birth date, birth location, address, etc.) to know in advance their
availability and eligibility to foster the selection. Moreover, mobile blood donation campaigns must be programmed
well in advance, and the date and place ought to be widely disseminated to have the highest number of blood donors.
To address these challenges, in this work, we aim to develop an ontology-based cyber-physical social system
(CPSS) that allows improving the mobile blood collection process by choosing the most appropriate site to install the
mobile truck in order to target as many donors as possible. Furthermore, the centric network approach has recently
been applied to ensure efficient information sharing and data flow between various spaces [1]. Indeed, this system is
intended to be used in Algeria, which is moving slowly but surely towards the digitalization of the blood collection
process. To make the mobile blood donation process easier to manage and faster to achieve, the idea is to integrate
new advanced technologies such as sensors, blood mobile applications that could be useful as they can facilitate
communications between BTS and donors [1]. In addition, the proposed system aims to identify new potential donors
(persons who will donate blood for the first time) and also to stay in touch with regular donors (donors who have
donated their blood more than once within a one year period). It will ensure that the eight weeks between two
successive blood donations are respected. Furthermore, when blood donors decide to use the mobile blood donation
application, their personal information is collected, and the access to these recorded data will be protected.
Figure 1 depicts the global architecture of our CPSS and illustrates the interaction between the different spaces and
their functionalities. The first space is a social space, which involve users of the system. The second space consists of
the allocated blood mobile truck, the needed resources, sensors, and mobile application. The third space is a cyberspace
which manage information from social and physical spaces. It is composed of five subspaces. The first subspace
represents data that aim to collect and store data. The second subspace is a semantic model which consists in
semantically linking the data together and also ensuring its interoperability so that these data can be leveraged as a
single source. The third subspace represents the semantic integration of data. The fourth subspace represents the
analysis of the correlated data to gain insight of the data, and formulate different hypotheses. Finally, the five subspace
constitute the application that consists of five main services.
 Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842 2835
/ Procedia Computer Science 00 (2019) 000–000 3

Fig. 1. Cyber-physical social system (CPSS) for mobile blood collection.

It should be pointed out that each data source possesses a specific vocabulary that is consistent with its perception of
the world. In this regard, semantic interoperability remains one of the most promising solutions to overcome many
heterogeneity problems. Indeed, it has been revealed over the past years that ontologies can be employed as an
effective tool for helping in integrating, organizing data, and searching semantic information [2]. The proposed
Mobile Blood Collection Ontology (MBCO) uses a top-level ontology expressed in the OWL language in order to
formalize the disparate data sources and make the integration easier. It aims to provide a domain-specific vocabulary
that guarantees interoperability between the data collected from different spaces to facilitate their real-time integration
and analysis. Consequently, this approach adds new value in CPSS by making the recorded data usable by the latter,
in order to facilitate finding the best location to install the bloodmobile truck, supporting decisions making, informing
donors, allocating resources, managing donor flow, and collecting personal information of donors.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The following section presents an overview of the existing blood
collection ontologies in the literature. Section 3 describes in details the developing approach of MBCO. Then, section
4 discusses the results. Finally, the conclusion and the future works are presented.

1. Literature review
In Iqbal et al. [3], an ontology for patients’ Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) is presented. It defines knowledge
about chronic disease. This ontology can be used for various EMR standards, to ensure semantic interoperability
among healthcare information systems.
The disease ontology (DO) [4] integrates medical vocabularies with a clear definition of about 931 terms and
classification for each disease. It is a standardized ontology structured under Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as it
represents realism. It includes all human disease knowledge, which are captured through direct and indirect semantic
relationships.
Compton [5] outlines the semantic sensor network (SSN) ontology, it provides sensors and observations with
related concepts and relations. This ontology was developed by W3C Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator Group
(SSN-XG). It defines sensors types, sensor measurement capacities, sensor resulting findings, models, method of
operation, metrological definitions, and deployments where sensors are employed.
In Brochhausen et al. [6], authors presents an open-source ontology of biobank administration called Ontologized
Minimum Information About Biobank data Sharing (OMIABIS) coded in OWL 2.0 and developed according to the
principles of the BFO. The aim is to provide a semantically rich representation of biobank administration to facilitate
the sharing of biobank data.
Huang [7] proposes a semantic search system based on the Ontology for MIcroRNA Target (OMIT) for microRNA-
target gene interaction data. They developed OMIT and demonstrated its use within a semantic search system. The
OMIT ontology consists of several terms and relations, it describes gene ontology, RNA datasets, biomedical,
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biological, and clinical research. This ontology facilitates data exchange standards for miRNA research and reduces
the lack of common data elements. The ontology is constructed using BFO as a top-level ontology and CCO (Common
Core ontologies) as mid-level suite of ontologies.
Mostafa and Youcef [8] propose a system that allows donors and blood donation centers to communicate efficiently
and to exchange blood information among different blood donation centers. The purpose of this work is to minimize
the waiting time of donors and the effort required for the blood donation process. To do so, they developed a blood
donation system (BDS) as an application based on the cutting-edge information technologies of cloud computing and
mobile computing. This proposed system includes services and an ontology interface system that provides a smart
search for suitable donors, helps to find the appropriate donor immediately, and provides information for health
organizations on blood availability all over the country. However, they did not take into consideration the privacy of
information, the weather conditions, and the allocation of resources.
Suesatsakulchai et al. [9] suggest a prototype for Blood Donor Complication Semantic Retrieval System
(BDCSRS) that aims to improve donor retention. The system development is based on the Blood Donor Complication
ontology. Based on this ontology, a semantic search system is proposed to increase efficiency when searching for
information. This system will permit a reduction in the incidence of complications, and encourage donors. However,
donors’ data privacy has not been taken into account.
In Maria et al. [10], the authors propose a user profile ontology (UPO) by using existing concepts and properties
from literature, ontologies, and applications to create a comprehensive and extensible user model as a standard that
can be adapted to the needs of every application to facilitate communication between them.
To the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted to develop an efficient ontology that can be exploited
by the digital mobile blood collection system, and that can serve to solve data heterogeneity. Existing ontologies do
not cover the semantics of the mobile blood collection process. They do not consider knowledge related to
bloodmobile truck, the time and space, resources and so on. The main contribution of this paper consists in defining
the common vocabulary that formalize the process of mobile blood collection. Furthermore, we will use different
classes from OMIT ontology to build our ontology which allow the classification of for example medical staff and
personal protective equipment.

2. MBCO development approach

In this section, we present the different steps of the development process of MBCO.
2.1. Specification Phase
To define a consistent ontology, we adopted METHONDOLOGY as a development methodology [11]. It is known
as one of the best methodologies with a high degree of maturity, in addition, it is a well-structured method with a set
of techniques and activities described in a very detailed way. It consists of five main steps: specification,
conceptualization, formalization, implementation, and maintenance [12].
2.1.1. Objectives
The principal objective of MBCO is to provide all the relevant knowledge in order to formalize the mobile blood
collection process. In the following, we describe in detail the formal presentation of MBCO.
2.1.2. Requirements
The key requirements of MBCO are listed below:
-The ontology is aligned with a top-level ontology and a set of mid level ontologies to facilitate the integration of
different ontological modules.
-The ontology reuses classes existing domain ontologies.
-The ontology captures the basic knowledge related to the mobile blood collection process.
-The ontology applies the principle of modularization. The idea is to develop self-contained, independent and
reusable ontological modules to facilitate the development process [13].
2.1.3. Competency questions
Gruninger and Fox [14] define Competency Questions (CQs) as a technique for defining the ontology
specifications. Below are some examples of the CQs that MBCO should be able to answer:
- What is the age of person ‘x’?
- Is the person ‘x’ available at time ‘y’?
- What is the date of the last blood donation of person ‘x’?
- Where is located the blood mobile truck ‘x’?
- What are the resources used by the medical staff in the mobile blood collection process ‘x’?
 Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842 2837
/ Procedia Computer Science 00 (2019) 000–000 5

-Is the blood chair ‘x’ available?

-When does the social-cultural event ‘x’ take place?

2.2. Conceptualization Phase

In the conceptualization phase, we start by choosing a top-level ontology. In the literature, there are different top
level ontologies such as BFO [15], DOLCE [16], GFO [17], SUMO [18], and UFO [19]. A review of these latters has
been presented in [20]. BFO is a domain-neutral top-level ontology, which has been created to represent a reality of
the word as it is, to integrate data steadily with a coherent hierarchy structure. Both DOLCE and SUMO are valuable,
but they are descriptive and suitable for representing a possible word. Thus, BFO holds the key to support information
retrieval, to handle the semantic interoperability between the different domain ontologies.
As shown in figure 2, BFO defines a starting point “entity” as a the most general class. Then, it defines two categories;
continuants and occurrents. Continuants are entities that exist through time and have no temporal parts. Occurents are
entities that occur over time.

Fig. 2. BFO’s classes hierarchy [21] .

Afterwards, we reused the set of mid-level ontologies CCO [21], that use BFO as top-level ontology and propose
eleven ontological modules. Moreover, we reused some classes from the existing domain ontology OMIT [7]. Then,
we proposed four modules to formalize the mobile blood collection process namely: donor module, sensor module,
resources module, and blood organization module. Figure 3 illustrates the proposed modules and their import structure.

Fig. 3. Mobile Blood Collection Ontology

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2.3. Formalization Phase

In the formalization phase, the Relation Ontology (RO) is significantly used to relate the different classes. It is a
collection of standard relations [22]. Furthermore, we defined new relations specific to MBCO.
2.3.1. Donor module
This module represents information related to donors, their roles, information, location, time, and so on.
In CCO, a person performs some act according to the role they fulfill. In the context of blood donation, a person is a
potential blood donor, he/she attributed the role of blood donor. To this end, we classify “mbco: donor role” as a “bfo:
role” that is defined as “a realizable entity that is possessed by its bearer because of some external circumstances also
it is thus always optional”.
Next, BFO includes a class “process” which exists in time by happening, occurring, or developing in time. “mbco: act
of blood donation” is classified under the class “cco: act” as a subclass of “bfo: process”. Then, we relate “cco: person”
to “mbco: donor role” using the relation “has role”, also the relationships “agent in” relate “person” to “act of blood
donation”,
Afterward, it is important to represent the duration of time for which the person bears the role of blood donor. CCO
represents this through the class “stasis”. A class “mbco: stasis of donor role” is classified under “cco: stasis”, and has
two sub-classes “mbco: stasis of regular donor role” and “mbco: stasis of new donor role”. Thereafter, the event
ontology from CCO is used.
“cco: change”, that is subclass of “cco: act”, is reused to define “mbco: gain of donor role” which is used to show the
start of the temporal interval that the person bears the role, and “mbco: loss of donor role” that is used to show the
start of the temporal interval that the person lost the role. Then, “mbco: donor role” is related to “mbco: stasis of donor
role”, “mbco: gain of donor role” and “mbco: loss of donor role” with the relationships “participates in”.
Moreover, the time ontology of CCO is reused, it defines temporal intervals including “cco: day”, “cco: month”, “cco:
year”. Then, we defined the class “mbco: date”, which permits us to know that “mbco: stasis of donor role” and “mbco:
gain of donor role” occurs on a particular day, month, and year.
We defined “mbco: donor designative information content entity” as a sub class of designative information content
entity (ICE) that is defined as “an ICE that consists of a set of symbols that denote some entity”. Afterward, we
classified the class “omit: personally identifiable information” under the class “mbco: donor designative information
content entity” and we used this class to define “mbco: address”, “mbco: telephone number”, “mbco: name”.
To collect information about a donor's location at any time when needed, spatial and temporal context is required. To
do so, CCO geospatial module is reused. “mbco: donor’s location” is classified under “cco: geopolitical entity” that
is subclass of “bfo: site”. Next, “mbco: geo positioning” is a process that determines a precise point at a specific time.
The output of geo-positioning is “mbco: donor’s location”. We related “geo positioning” to “date” using the relatioship
“occurs on”. We associate “mbco: global positioning system sensor” from sensor module, and “cco: person” to “mbco:
geo positioning” using the relationships “participates in” and “is affected by “ respectively.”
Geo positioning can be defined FOL as follows:
∀𝑥𝑥, 𝑦𝑦, 𝑧𝑧[𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔 𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝(𝑥𝑥) ≡
(𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝𝑝(𝑥𝑥)^𝑦𝑦(𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑’𝑠𝑠 𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙(𝑦𝑦)^ 𝑥𝑥 ℎ𝑎𝑎𝑎𝑎 𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜 𝑦𝑦)^𝑧𝑧(𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑(𝑧𝑧)^𝑥𝑥 𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜 𝑜𝑜𝑜𝑜 𝑧𝑧))] (1)
In MBCO, a blood collection process is defined as “bfo: process”. Then, we formlized “mbco: mobile blood collection
process” and “mbco: fixed blood collection process” under “mbco: blood collection process” . Because the planning
of blood collection process is a date and time-variant, thus, we relate it with “cco: date identifier” and “cco: time of
day identifier” using the relationship “has date” and “has time” respectively. Eventually, an act of blood donation is
related to the blood collection process with the relationship “is part of process”.

2.3.2. Resource module

Adequate blood resources management plays an important role in the success of the mobile blood collection process.
The resource module formlizes all the needed resource including material resources and staff.
In MBCO, we reused the class “cco: vehicle” to define “mbco: blood mobile truck” which corresponds to “a vehicle
equipped with everything necessary for a blood donation procedure”. For better classification, we inclued the class
“mbco: equipment” under the class “cco: artifact”, to classify for example, “mbco: chair”, “mbco: blood bag”.
Moreover, we reused classes from OMIT such as, “omit: personal protective equipment” that is the subclass of “omit:
mask”, and “omit: collection device”. Besides, we reused the class “omit: medical staff” under “cco: person” to define
“mbco: nurse” and “mbco: doctor”. Furthermore, as the collection process takes place inside the bloodmobile truck,
we used the relation “take place in” between “mobile blood collection process” and “blood mobile truck”.
 Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842 2839
/ Procedia Computer Science 00 (2019) 000–000 7

As indicated previously, bloodmobile truck is a large van containing necessary equipment for the blood collection
process, it is temporarily installed in public places such as university, mall, and so on. In this way, we related the class
“bloodmobile truck” to “geopolitical entity” class from the module donor, using the relationship “located in”.

2.3.3. Sensor module

Sensors play a key role in our CPSS. Accordingly, this module describes sensors and how they are related to the
resources module and donor module.
We first reused the class “cco: sensor” which is defined as “a transducer that is designed to detect events or changes
in its environment, and then provide a corresponding output”. It includes “mbco: proximity sensor”, “mbco: global
positioning system sensor”, “mbco: touch sensor” and “mbco: weather sensor”. For example, the proximity sensor is
used to detect how many donors are waiting to donate. We related “person” to “proximity sensor” using the
relationship “is detected by”, and “proximity sensor” to “bloodmobile truck” using the relationship “part of”.
Additionally, weather changes may affect the decision to donate blood. Accordingly, we used a sensor that is capable
to measure physical phenomena such as temperature and so on; we reused the class “omit: weather” classified under
“bfo: process”. Tthen, to know when and where the weather occurs, the class “omit: weather” is related to “mbco:
date” and “cco: geopolitical entity” with the relationship “is predicted on” and “is predicted at” respectively.

2.3.4. Blood organization module

This module describes the role of blood transfusion organizations, their information, structures’ location, and their
actions. First, we reused agent ontology from CCO to classify the class “mbco: blood transfusion organization”. Then,
we relate “mbco: blood transfusion organization” with the class “mbco: blood transfusion organization member role”,
which is classified under “cco: organization member role”, using the relationship “has role”. The relationship
“participates in” is used to relate “mbco: blood transfusion organization” to the class “mbco: act of blood collection
planning”. Eventually, each module has at least one relationship with other modules.

Fig.4. Partial view of modules illustrated using graffoo

2.3.5. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL)

Once the modules are created, we used the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) 1 to define the rules. In fact, the
use of SWRL is relevant considering that certain kinds of inferences cannot be done only by description logic (DL)
axioms. Rules are in the form of an implication between an antecedent (body) and consequent (head). This indicates
that all atoms in the consequent must be maintained if all of the conditions in the antecedent are satisfied. Another
important characteristic of SWRL is built-in functions since they allow mathematical tests, they are preceded by the
swrlb prefix. For example, in MBCO, we need to express the eligibility rules to determine whether a person can donate
blood or not. Table 1 presents some of the defined SWRL rules.

1
http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/
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8 / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2022) 000–000

Table1. SWRL rules

SWRL rule
R1 person(?p)^hasAge(?p,?age)^swrlb:greaterthanorequal(?age,70) -> loss of donor role(?x)
o Classify individuals of class person with an hasAge property value of greater than 70 as member of the class
loss of donor role
R2 person(?x)^hasAge(?x, ?age)^swrlb:lessthanorequal((?age,18) -> loss of donor role (?x)
o Classify individuals of class person with an hasAge property value of less than 18 as member of the class loss
of donor role
R3 person(?x)^hasWeight(?x,?weight)^swrlb:lessthan(?weight,50) -> loss of donor role(?x)
o Classify individuals of class person with an hasWeight property value of less than 50 as member of the class
loss of donor role
R4 person(?x)^disease(?d)^hasDisposition(?x, ?d)-> loss of donor role(?x)
o Classify individuals of class person that has a disease, as a member of the class loss of donor role.
R5 Person(?x)^donor_role(?d)^ has_role(?x,?d)^participates_in(?d, ?y)^ gain_of_donor_role(?y)
^numberOfDonation(?y, ?nd)^ swrlb:greaterThan(?nd, 1) -> stasis_of_regular_donor_role(?d)
o This rule indicate how can new donor shift to the regular donor, so it classify individuals of class persons with
a has role property with donor role, and donor role whose participates in property with gain of donor that has
a numberOfDonation value greater than 1 as member of the class stasis of regular donor role

2.4. Evaluation and Discussion

The ontology evaluation phase is very important, it is about comparing the built ontology to the specification elements
and checking if the ontology correctly answers the defined CQs. To do so, we first used Pellet reasoner, which is
integrated in Protégé, to check the consistency of the ontology. Then, we translate the CQs into SPARQL (Simple
Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries to test the usability of MBCO. In the following, we present some
examples of the obtained results:
- CQ1: Who are the persons that donate blood on day “x”?

Fig.5. SPARQL query for first competency question

As can be seen in Figure 5, the result outlines all the persons who pointed out to donate blood.
CQ3: What are the used resources by the medical staff in the mobile blood collection process “x”?

Fig.6. SPARQL query for third competency question

 / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2019) 000–000 9
Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842 2841

Figure 6 reports the used equipment by the medical staff for the mobile blood collection process. Both nurses and
doctors are using personal protective equipment. Concerning the nurses, they may perform preparation and handling,
they use blood bags and need to be aware of how to properly use them.

- CQ4: Where is located the bloodmobile truck “x”?

Fig.7. SPARQL query for four competency question

As shown in Figure 7, the mobile blood truck is located in Tlemcen City, then, we extracted all the visiting places by
the blood mobile truck to target donors.
As stated in the introduction, our main objective is to develop a digital system for the mobile blood collection process
in Algeria. The aim is to ensure semantic interoperability of the data coming from the different data sources of the
CPSS (cyber, physical, and social space). Efficient interaction between the different heterogeneous data sources is
crucial for CPSS performance. The presented approach exploits the use of ontologies, and how they are suitable to
achieve semantic interoperability. Furthermore, the ontology could be exploited by each service of the CPSS. We used
METHONDOLOGY to develop MBCO. Starting by the specification, it was important to clearly identify the ontology
purpose in collaboration with domain experts. In the conceptualization phase, we identified the key concepts of the
mobile blood collection process that should be formalized. We demonstrated the importance of ontology
modularization, and highlighted the performance of using BFO as a top-level ontology, and CCO as a mid-level
ontology to integrate the different ontological modules.
In the formalization phase, we transformed the conceptual model into a formal one by identifying the diverse
relationships between classes. In the implementation phase, we used Protégé to implement the different modules. We
end with the evaluation phase that enabled us to check the consistency and usability of MBCO.
We believe that this proposed ontology and its exploitation by the CPSS is a step towards the advancement of the
mobile blood collection process.

3. Conclusion and future works

In this work, we presented MBCO, a modular suite of ontologies that formalizes the mobile blood collection process.
MBCO consists of four main ontological modules, which are the blood donor module, sensors module, blood
organization module, and resources module. Besides, to ensure the consistency of the ontology and to facilitate the
integration of the different modules, we used BFO as a top-level ontology and CCO as mid-level ontologies. Moreover,
MBCO reuses some classes from OMIT ontology. The proposed ontology is evaluated by means of SPARQL
queries.is that the use of BFO and CCO facilitate MBCO reuse and extension by other systems and for applications.
As future work, MBCO will be extended to cover further information of the mobile blood collection process, besides,
other rules will be added to enrich the ontology. In addition, MBCO will be exploited by the CPSS to analyze donors'
information in order to decide where to install the mobile blood collection truck.
10 / Procedia Computer Science 00 (2022) 000–000
2842 Ikram Ghernaout et al. / Procedia Computer Science 207 (2022) 2833–2842

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