Semi-automatic generation of a patient preoperative knowledge-base from a legacy clinical database

Abstract

We discuss our practical experience of automating the process of migrating a clinical database with a weak underlying information model towards a high level representation of a patient medical history information in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The purpose of this migration is to enable sophisticated clinical decision support functionalities based on semantic-web technologies, i.e. reasoning on a clinical ontology. We discuss the research and practical motivation behind this process, including improved interoperability and additional classification functionalities. We propose a methodology to optimise the efficiency of this process and provide practical implementation examples. © Springer-Verlag 2009.