Introduction

I am Chimezie Ogbuji, Lead Systems Analyst in the Cardiothoracic and 
Surgery Research department of the Cleveland Clinic.  My role in this 
department is technological oversight, software architecture, design and 
deployment of an ongoing project to replace a very dated but valuable 
Cardiovascular Information Registry implemented orginally as a relational 
database and serves at the heart of the research Cardiothoracic procedures 
research we do on a daily basis here.

In particular the project aims to completely supplant the existing system 
with a framework and a set of (patent pending) methodologies for 
automating the modeling, management, data entry, and day-to-day operations 
of a content management system built around XML and RDF technologies for 
data interchange, analysis, and general data management.  We are using 
XForms as the primary mechanism for remote data entry and have an 
framework that facilitates automatic dual representation of content as XML 
and RDF such that XML serves as a lingua franca between web-based, 
controlled, data-entry and a central remote repository.  We query our 
content via XQuery, SPARQL, and Versa.

Our above set of methodologies includes a framework for rapid modelling of 
arbitrary bioinformatic domains that leverages a variety of data/knowledge 
modeling dialects including: XML Schema, OWL, Simple Knowledge 
Organization System (SKOS), and RDFS.

The long term goal is a research platform that can be deployed to address 
any conceivable domain of medicine with minimal cost to setup, maintain, 
and extend into unintended areas.  We also hope to leverage ongoing 
efforts in the areas of Rule languages to facilitate a way for valuable 
research observations to feedback into day-to-day practice of Physicians.

We hope through this forum we can contribute to and learn from the 
collective lessons learned about how Semantic Web Technology can be 
pragmatically applied to solve the kinds of problems that are ubiquitous 
in the Health Care and Life Sciences arena.

Personally, I'm involved in the Semantic Web Interest Group (not in any 
formal capacity), write often SW-related technology insights/issues, and 
contribute (heavily) to RDFLib (a Python-based, open-source RDF library) 
and 4Suite (a library of integrated tools for XML/RDF processing and 
content management).

My general interest in Semantic Web activity is primarily in the area of 
nuts-and-bolts, practical solutions.  I believe adoption in the software 
development communities is a key ingredient along the path to Semantic Web 
ubiquity.  I'm a big fan of demonstrating value with targetted prototypes 
and bite-sized problem solving.

With regards to HCLSIG, interests are primarily in ontology 'engineering', 
cross-domain vocabularies/ontologies, architecture and software deployment 
best practices, and the application of Semantic Web technologies to 
Clinical Trials.  I'm looking forward to working with this Interest Group.

Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org
http://copia.ogbuji.net

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 18:07:17 UTC