Maps of Medical Reason: Applying Knowledge Graphs and Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education and Practice

This chapter explores the connections between the bio and the digital in the construction of ‘bioinformation’ and ‘biodigital convergence’. The site of examination of these connections is medical understandings of the body. Its focus is the notion of ontology in two related senses, philosophical and technical. The chapter considers the connections between, on the one hand, the immaterial understanding reflected in medical knowledge—in philosophical terms ‘the ideal’ or ideational—and on the other, the material, biological realities of bodies. In a technical sense, the chapter discusses medical ontologies in a computer science frame of reference, and the emergence in recent years of ‘knowledge graphs’ for their representation. On these philosophical and technical bases, the chapter goes on to discuss a research and development project in which the authors have been engaged, to develop a web-based knowledge graphing environment, with a wide range of potential sites of applications, one to support medical students in clinical case analysis, and the other to build medical logic visualizations to supplement electronic health records.