Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 1, numbers 2 and 3, 2009 // View article

Towards Semantic Exchange of Clinical Documents

Authors:
Juha Puustjärvi
Leena Puustjärvi

Keywords: e-health; open healthcare systems; semantic interoperability; ontologies.

Abstract:
Nowadays healthcare institutions have major problems with accessing and maintaining the large amounts of data that are continuously being generated. In addition, system interoperation is of prime importance as much of the patients’ relevant information may be historic, and may have been gathered over many encounters with healthcare providers in different locations using heterogeneous healthcare information systems. In order to promote system interoperation several organizations in the healthcare sector have produced standards and representation forms using XML. However, the introduction of these XML-based technologies is not enough to provide a means to interpret the semantics of the exchanged messages. As a result, extending systems by new parties as well as introducing new message types is inconvenient. Replacing existing hard-coded medical information systems by open healthcare information systems that support semantic interoperation, are extensible, and maintainable is a challenging research problem. In this article we have restricted ourselves on this problem. In particular, we described our work on using RDF in exchanged clinical documents. Such documents themselves describe their semantics, and so they are in a machine understandable form. Hence RDF-based messaging represents an open, easily maintainable and extensible way for developing interoperable open systems.

Pages: 69 to 76

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 1, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660