Abstract
The main rationale of biomedical terminologies and formalized clinical information models is to provide semantic standards to improve the exchange of meaningful clinical information. Whereas terminologies should express context-independent meanings of domain terms, information models are built to represent the situational and epistemic contexts in which domain terms are used. In practice, semantic interoperability is encumbered by a plurality of different encodings of the same piece of clinical information. The same meaning can be represented by single codes in different terminologies, pre- and postcoordinated expressions in the same terminology, as well as by different combinations of (partly overlapping) terminologies and information models.
Formal ontologies can support the automatically recognition and processing of such heterogeneous but isosemantic expressions. In the SemanticHealthNet Network of Excellence a semantic framework is being built which addresses the goal of semantic interoperability by proposing a generalized methodology of transforming existing resources into “semantically enhanced” ones. The semantic enhancements consist in annotations as OWL axioms which commit to an upper-level ontology that provides categories, relations, and constraints for both domain entities and informational entities. Prospects and the challenges of this approach – particularly human and computational limitations – are discussed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Heflin, J., Hendler, J.: Semantic Interoperability on the Web (2000), http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/pubs/extreme2000.pdf (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Quine, W.V.: On what there is. In: Gibson, R. (ed.) Quintessence-Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine. Belknap Press, Cambridge (2004)
Bodenreider, O., Smith, B., Burgun, A.: The Ontology‐Epistemology Divide: A Case Study in Medical Terminology. In: Proceedings of FOIS 2004, pp. 185–195. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2004)
Hofweber, T.: Logic and Ontology. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013th edn. (Spring 2013), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/logic-ontology/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). Medical Subject Headings, MeSH (2013), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Smith, B., Ashburner, M., Rosse, C., Bard, J., Bug, W., Ceusters, W., Goldberg, L.J., Eilbeck, K., Ireland, A., Mungall, C.J.: OBI Consortium. In: Leontis, N., Rocca-Serra, P., Ruttenberg, A., Sansone, S.A., Scheuermann, R.H., Shah, N., Whetzel, P.L., Lewis, S. (eds.) The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration. Nature Biotechnology, vol. 25(11), pp. 1251–1255 (November 2007)
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms, SNOMED CT (2008), http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct (last accessed July 17, 2013)
World Health Organization (WHO). International Classification of Diseases (ICD) (2013), http://www.who.int/classifications/icd (last accessed July 17, 2013)
OpenEHR. An open domain-driven platform for developing flexible e-health systems, http://www.openehr.org (last accessed July 17, 2013)
En13606 Association, http://www.en13606.org/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Health Level Seven International, http://www.hl7.org/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
SemanticHealthNet Network of Excellence, http://www.semantichealthnet.eu/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D.L., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P.F.: The Description Logic Handbook. Theory, Implementation, and Applications, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2007)
W3C OWL working group. OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, Document Overview. W3C Recommendation (December 11, 2012), http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Schulz, S., Jansen, L.: Formal ontologies in biomedical knowledge representation. Yearbook of Medical Informatics (2013)
Cohen, S.M.: Aristotle’s metaphysics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2012), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Schober, D., Smith, B., Lewis, S.E., Kusnierczyk, W., Lomax, J., Mungall, C., Taylor, C.F., Rocca-Serra, P., Sansone, S.A.: Survey-based naming conventions for use in OBO Foundry ontology development. BMC Bioinformatics 10, 125 (2009)
Seddig-Raufie, D., Jansen, L., Schober, D., Boeker, M., Grewe, N., Schulz, S.: Proposed actions are no actions: re-modeling an ontology design pattern with a realist top-level ontology. J. Biomed. Semantics 3(suppl. 2), S2 (2012)
Schulz, S., Boeker, M.: BioTopLite: An Upper Level Ontology for the Life Sciences. In: Evolution, Design and Application. Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences, Koblenz, Germany, September 19-20 (2013)
TermInfo Project, http://www.hl7.org/special/committees/terminfo/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Clinical Information Modeling Initiative (CIMI), http://informatics.mayo.edu/CIMI/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Clinical Element Model (CEM), http://informatics.mayo.edu/sharp/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Logical Record Architecture (LRA), http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/data/lra (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Detailed Clinical Models (DCMs), http://www.detailedclinicalmodels.nl/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Martínez Costa, C., Schulz, S.: Ontology-based reinterpretation of the SNOMED CT context model. In: Fourth International Conference in Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO 2013), Montreal, Canada, July 6-9 (2013)
SPARQL Query Language For RDF. W3C Recommendation (January 15, 2008), http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ (last accessed July 17, 2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Schulz, S., Martínez-Costa, C. (2013). How Ontologies Can Improve Semantic Interoperability in Health Care. In: Riaño, D., Lenz, R., Miksch, S., Peleg, M., Reichert, M., ten Teije, A. (eds) Process Support and Knowledge Representation in Health Care. ProHealth KR4HC 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8268. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03916-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03916-9_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03915-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03916-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)