From Fragmented Knowledge to Semantic Integration: An Ontology Framework for Elderly Research in the Thai Aging Society

Abstract

This study presents the development of a domain-specific ontology to structure knowledge for aging research in Thailand, in response to the increasing fragmentation across disciplines. The ontology formally represents 10 core domains, including research, policy, health, quality of life, and age-friendly cities, reflecting national research priorities while remaining compatible with established gerontological and semantic web standards. The study adopts a structured ontology engineering methodology adapted from Noy and McGuinness, encompassing scope definition, vocabulary elicitation, class hierarchy design, property specification, constraint formulation, and evaluation. Primary knowledge sources are derived from national research repositories. The resulting ontology comprises 10 top-level classes and 27 subclasses. Quality assessment is conducted through automated evaluation using the Ontology Pitfall Scanner (OOPS!) and expert-based review by three domain specialists, serving as an initial validation of structural soundness and domain coherence rather than a statistically generalizable evaluation. While the ontology provides a semantic foundation that may support ontology-driven retrieval, reasoning, and policy-oriented knowledge integration, empirical performance evaluation is beyond the scope of this study. Overall, the work contributes a transparent and context-sensitive ontology development case that may inform future semantic web applications in aging research.