There is interest in using RDF and OWL to support Semantic Web Services
over the NHIN.
Anyone interested in helping can contact me.
Dan
On 3/12/2010 8:40 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
conor dowling wrote:
> U.S.? (There's little here from what I can see - the
interoperability push is around SOAP).
In my view, SOAP is the wrong direction. It is just adds
complexity and
contributes to "babelization":
http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0717-semweb-dbooth/slide10-0.html
you're right but here's the rub - there's $'s in babel. Bad IT -
translation layers and their maintenance - is good business, sometimes.
Take the U.S. NHIN CONNECT project whose laudable goal is to allow
patient record exchange between institutions big and small. It
tackles what's need - security, credentials, opt-in etc - and then
... well, it gets all SOAP'y. Gateways, adapters, layers, all those
layers. What about a "web of interlinked data", just add security
policy ...??
It's annoying because think how easy linking is - in reality and now,
not just conceptually, some time away. (I know I'm preaching to the
choir here but ...)
Take a patient vital - http://vista.caregraf.org/rambler/120.5/716
(Christopher's blood pressure at a date). This record is typed by the
VA vital type, http://vista.caregraf.org/rambler/120.51/1 (blood
pressure), one of 19 that the system records (
http://vista.caregraf.org/rambler/120.51 ). Vital type is a "locked
file" ( http://vista.caregraf.org/rambler/schema/120.51 ), one of
many terminology files in VistA.
Now, on the face of it, such data is meaningless outside this VistA.
We need a "mapping layer", an "RPC". A "type-mapper". A reformatter.
Layers ...
BUT WE KNOW (on this group) that it is trival to do something like ...
:120.51/1 ---- same as -----> SNOMED:392570002
and heh presto, your vitals are "linked". Were Christopher lucky
enough to end up in the Cleveland Clinic then this and his other data
would be trivial to query - no longer site or even VA-specific.
And this isn't an isolated case. It's true in general. (I'm working
on an "linked patient browser" - needs very little code - and this
principle holds true for procedures, medicines, vaccines ...).
The train is leaving the station on health records (in the U.S.
'meaningful use' is about to get nailed down) and they're made for
the web of data but all we have are soap bubbles, all a drift ...
Is there going to be an RDF model based Linked Data View over this
data? Or are you looking for help re. Linked Data publishing etc?
