Semantic data integration in the domain of medicine

Abstract

Finding an efficient solution to a problem of medical data integration is an important challenge for computer science and technology. Medical data integration is necessary both to retrieve missing data of an individual patient (horizontal integration) and to merge similar data from varied medical repositories (vertical integration) in order to increase data reliability. In the paper, we propose to solve the problem of medical data integration by means of an algebraic approach. In this approach also heterogeneous data can be considered. If only we know data taxonomies, can interpret data schemas and design schema mappings, then semantic and syntax differences are not an obstacle to integration. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.