Towards clinical intelligence with SADI semantic web services: a case study with hospital-acquired infections data

  • Authors:

  • Alexandre Riazanov;Gregory W. Rose;Artjom Klein;Alan J. Forster;Christopher Jo Baker;Arash Shaban-Nejad;David L. Buckeridge

  • Affiliations:

  • University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada;University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada;University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada;University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, Canada;McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for the Life Sciences
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Clinical Intelligence, as a research and engineering discipline, is dedicated to the development of tools for data analysis for the purposes of clinical research, surveillance and rational health care management. Ad hoc querying of clinical data is one desirable type of functionality. Since most of the data is currently stored in relational or similar form, ad hoc querying is problematic as it requires specialised technical skills and the knowledge of particular data schemas. A possible solution is semantic querying where the user formulates queries in terms of domain ontologies that are much easier to navigate and comprehend than data schemas. Existing approaches to semantic querying of relational data, based on declarative semantic mappings from data schemas to ontologies, such as RDFizing and query rewriting, cannot cope with situations when some computation is required to turn relational data into RDF or OWL, e. g., to implement temporal reasoning. In this paper, we are exploring the possibility of using SADI Semantic Web services for semantic querying of clinical data and report preliminary progress on prototyping a semantic querying infrastructure for the surveillance of, and research on hospital-acquired infections.