Title:SemanticDB: A Semantic Web Infrastructure for Clinical Research and Quality Reporting
Volume: 7
Issue: 3
Author(s): Christopher D. Pierce, David Booth, Chimezie Ogbuji, Chris Deaton, Eugene Blackstone and Doug Lenat
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Clinical data, clinical research, electronic medical records, inference, ontology, quality reporting, RDF, semantic
web, SemanticDB, health care data, XML format.
Abstract: Semantic Web technologies offer the potential to revolutionize management of health care data by increasing
interoperability and reusability while reducing the need for redundant data collection and storage. From 1998 through
2010, Cleveland Clinic sponsored a project designed to explore and develop this potential. The product of this effort,
SemanticDB, is a suite of software tools and knowledge resources built to facilitate the collection, storage and use of the
diverse data needed to conduct clinical research and health care quality reporting. SemanticDB consists of three main
components: 1) a content repository driven by a meta-model that facilitates collection and integration of data in an XML
format and automatically converts the data to RDF; 2) an inference-mediated, natural language query interface designed to
identify patients who meet complex inclusion and exclusion criteria; and 3) a data production pipeline that uses inference
to generate customized views of the repository content for statistical analysis and reporting. Since 2008, this system has
been used by the Cleveland Clinic's Heart and Vascular Institute to support numerous clinical investigations, and in 2009
Cleveland Clinic was certified to submit data produced in this manner to national quality monitoring databases sponsored
by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and the American College of Cardiology.
