Semantic Interoperability in Telemedicine through Ontology-Driven Services

Abstract

TELEMEDICINE INVOLVES THE INTEGRATION of information, human–machine, and healthcare technologies. As different modalities of patient care require applications running in heterogenous computing environments, software interoperability is a major issue in telemedicine. Software interoperability may be defined as”the capability with which two or more programs can share and process information regardless of their implementation language and platform.”1 The development methodology for interoperable telemedicine systems has been outlined.2 Ontology can be defined as a set of concepts understood in a knowledge base. A formal ontology specifies a way of constructing a knowledge base about some part of the world and, thus, contains a set of allowed concepts and rules that define the allowable relationships between concepts. In other words, it is a structured repository for knowledge, consisting of a collection of knowledge elements such as rules and their associated data model. Ontology has emerged as a major technique for software interoperation. In this paper we highlight the importance of ontology from the perspective of semantic interoperation, describe the issues in software interoperation, highlight the importance of ontology in software interoperation, describe the major elements of our framework, describe some related efforts,3 and describe the scope of further research in this area. SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY