MediBot: An Ontology based Chatbot for Portuguese Speakers Drug’s Users

Abstract

Brazil is one of the countries with the highest level of drug consumption in the world. By 2012 about 66% claimed to practice self-medication. Such activity can lead to a wide range of risks, including death from drug intoxication. Studies indicate that a lack of knowledge about drugs and their dangers is one of the main aggravating factors in this scenario. This work aims to universalize access to information about medications and their risks for different user profiles, especially Brazilian and lay users. In this paper, we presented the construction process of a Linked Data Mashup (LDM) integrating the datasets: consumer drug prices, government drug prices and drug’s risks in pregnant from ANVISA and SIDER from BIO2RDF. In addition, this work presents MediBot, an ontology-based chatbot capable of responding to requests in natural language in Portuguese through the instant messenger Telegram, smoothing the process to query the data. MediBot acts like a native language query interface on an LDM that works as an abstraction layer that provides an integrated view of multiple heterogeneous data sources.