Need for a specialized metamodel for biomedical and health informatics domain

Abstract

The history of computing has taught the software community significant lessons and few of them in a hard way. After spending numerous resources, the community has realized the need for establishing standards or specification for efficiently handling interoperability issues across diverse applications and tools. For example, UML for model driven development, and XML for information exchange. The domain of biomedical informatics is traversing through a similar path where numerous resources are employed for achieving interoperability among heterogeneous biomedical applications. To mitigate this issue and learning from previous experiences, the biomedical domain has to establish a modeling standard for design and development of its software applications and tools. Towards this goal, this research article proposes a minimal metamodel for the domain of biomedical and health informatics based on MOF and UMLS Semantic Network.