Role of semantic web in health informatics

Abstract

Leveraging the rapidly increasing amount of health care data to demonstrably enhance quality of clinical research and patient care has become a critical challenge for health care providers, researchers, and informaticians. In addition to the sheer volume of the data, the large disparity in storage formats, distributed locations, and variable quality of data, is exacerbating data management issues. There is an urgent need to address these issues to enable multi-center clinical studies, comply with new health care policies that encourage adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR), and effectively move towards the National Institutes of Health (NIH) roadmap of translational research. The Semantic Web initiative by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has defined a set of standards and technologies for representing, integration, and querying large-scale data with increasing use in health care, exemplified by the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences (HCLS) Interest Group. Ontologies are a core feature of the Semantic Web and are being increasingly adopted by the biomedical community, which is demonstrated by the more than 260 ontologies listed at the National Center for Biomedical Ontologies (NCBO). This tutorial will weave together three themes and the associated topics: Semantic Web and Biomedical Ontologies Key Technologies - Semantic Provenance and Data Integration Real World Use Cases and In-Use Tools