Chapter 1 - Semantic modeling for healthcare applications: an introduction

Abstract

Healthcare is a sensitive domain for human beings and needs extra care to monitor patients and elderly people. Massive exploitation of associated devices is the primary source for collecting health data during the monitoring of patients. All connected devices such as sensors, actuators, and RFIDs produce challenging data simultaneously and sometimes lack consistency and provide incorrect information. Recently, semantic web technologies have been involved in overcoming these issues and provide a semantic and syntactic representation of data that are interpreted by machines and humans. Ontologies are presented as a backbone of the semantic web and exhibited in semantic models with explicit representation of health data and connected devices. The primary aim of semantic modeling of healthcare data is to facilitate its domain's reusability and generalized representation. In this chapter, a brief introduction of healthcare semantic models has been discussed in general-purpose and domain-specific IoT-based semantic models. It also covers semantic modeling phases such as semantic annotation, semantic linking, the construction process, and semantic representation. Various case studies and examples include all phases.