Re: An Universal Exchange Language

When I see this: 

"Data Aggregation “Middleware”
An important feature of today’s environment is that there is relatively little standardization in the health 
data captured and stored by different providers of healthcare services. Although a great deal of data 
already exist in the form of claims data, prescribing information, lab and imaging results, and clinical 
records, much of this data is trapped in different, incompatible databases. The last few years have seen 
the emergence of new middleware products designed to extract data from disparate legacy systems 
and put them in a compatible format. Examples include products and companies such as dbMotion, 
ICA CareAlign, Medicity MediTrust, Microsoft Amalga, Oracle HTB, and Orion Health. These technologies 
can play a role in making the transition from the current environment with little interoperability and 
document based data exchange to an environment where data can be easily accessed and queried and 
assembled for a broad variety of uses."

I think its clear no one from semantic web was part of that group... 

But if we add up the requirements they have between splitting data into atomic elements (RDF) and integration for sharing data across incompatible databases (linked data), the semantic web already provides mechanisms and methods to provide them with a response...

We can't put aside HL7/CDA as it has been stated, simply because part of the industry is already migrating, but more importantly, a considerable effort for modeling the clinical world as been done so far. HL7 could be wrapped up into semantic web technologies instead. 

Best.

Rémy Choquet
iNSERM - Knowledge Engineering in HealthCare, France

Le 14 déc. 2010 à 23:32, Matthias Samwald a écrit :

> Jim wrote:
> "Like it or not, they were probably thinking of HL7 and ISO 21090. We would need to show how semweb solutions are a better solution, or how it is tied too much to healthcare, leaving out life sciences, population science, chemistry, etc. We don't yet have *a* solution for this, we have several. :-) "
>  
> Besides the fact that HL7 et al. are already better established in the current healthcare IT infrastructure than RDF/OWL, it does not seem too hard to come up with reasonable arguments in favour of RDF/OWL. I also read other seemingly RDF-friendly pieces of text in that document:
> 
> "As mentioned, ONC’s CDA is a foundational step in the right direction. However, the thrust of CDA seems 
> largely that it be an extensible wrapper that can hold a variety of structured reports or documents, each 
> with vocabulary controlled metadata. While this shares many features with the universal exchange 
> language that we envisage, it lacks many others. In particular, it perpetuates the record  centric notion 
> that data elements should “live” inside documents (albeit metadata tagged). We think that a universal 
> exchange language must facilitate the exchange of metadata tagged elements at a more atomic and 
> disaggregated level, so that their varied assembly into documents or reports can itself be a robust, 
> entrepreneurial marketplace of applications. In a similar vein, we view the semantics of metadata tags 
> as an arena in which new players can participate (by “publishing”), not as one limited to a vocabulary 
> controlled by the government"
>  
> Cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
>  
> // DERI Galway, Ireland
> // Information Retrieval Facility, Austria
> // http://samwald.info
>  
>  
> 
>