Using semantic web in ICD-11: Three years down the road

Abstract

The World Health Organization is using Semantic Web technologies in the development of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Health officials use ICD in all United Nations member countries to compile basic health statistics, to monitor health-related spending, and to inform policy makers. In 2010, we published a paper in the ISWC In Use track reporting on our experience in the first six months with building and deploying iCAT, a Semantic Web platform to support the collaborative authoring of ICD-11. Three years since our original publication, 270 domain experts around the world have used iCAT to author more than 45,000 classes, to perform more than 260,000 changes, and to create more than 17,000 links to external medical terminologies. During the last three years, the collaboration processes, modeling and tooling have evolved significantly, and we have learned important lessons, which we will report in this paper. We describe the benefits of using semantic technologies as an infrastructure, which proved to be critical in making support for this rapid evolution possible. To our knowledge, this effort is the only real-world project supporting the collaborative authoring of ontologies at this scale, and which, at the same time, has a high visibility and impact for the health care around the world. We believe that the insights that we gained and the lessons that we learned after four years into this large-scale project will be useful to others who need to support similar collaborative projects. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.