Semantic P2P Network for Healthcare

Abstract

Sharing of information is an important topic for healthcare. Traditionally, information sharing uses client/server technology, but it has many shortcomings in the cases of huge number of users and huge amount of data. P2P technology is now considered as the suitable computing model to the above cases. There are mainly two types of P2P technologies-the unstructured approach and the structured approach based on distributed hash table (DHT). However, these two kinds of P2P approaches do not care about the semantic meaning of the nodes. They do not care about the nodes whose users may take different roles in social groups in the communities. This leads to lack of powerful solutions for selecting healthcare information by complicated conditions. Here, we present a semantic P2P network- virtual hierarchical tree grid organizations (VIRGO) for healthcare to solve the above problem. It has aspects of decentralization, scalability and availability.In the semantic P2P network (VIRGO) for healthcare, the information of healthcare is classified into hierarchical domains. One computer node holds the healthcare information of one domain. The nodes construct the VIRGO network according to the domains of their contents. Therefore, the users (such patients, doctors, hospitals, academic institutes, etc) are involved in the semantic P2P network, and can connect directly in peer to peer ways and share information and knowledge directly. It can discover the complicated healthcare information, users, agents, companies, and so on by SQL-like statements.