Towards a natural language-based interface for querying hospital data

There is a growing necessity in various domains for non-programmers to be able to retrieve information gathered about the operation of the organization and stored in its databases. This information could hugely benefit the decision making process of the managers of the institution, but it is not often exploited due to the complexity of extracting the information from the existing data. In this paper we sketch a way how that information could be managed by the domain experts themselves by the means of a natural language-based query language that works upon data stored in the ontology. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is indeed easy-to-use by our target end-users - managers and physicians of hospitals -, because lacking technical details the query language is very intuitive to use.