Clinical semantics

Abstract

We discuss the challenge of efficient and flexible clinical informatics and provide initial results on how to tackle the computerized management of the complex and diverse information space of clinical medicine through an approach coined as open information management. The approach builds on natural language as the core information management tool in place of formal, structured representation. The chapter discusses a flexible, evolving clinical practice supported by open clinical agents for both clinical professionals and patients capable of learning at the human abstraction level. Clinical semantics is not an add-on but rather natively integrated to, and an operational principle behind, the functionality of these agents. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.