Towards a Semantic Web of Evidence-Based Medical Information

It is the vision of the protagonists of the Semantic Web to achieve “a set of connected applications for data on the Web in such a way as to form a consistent logical Web of data” (Berners-Lee, 1998, p. 1). Therefore, the Semantic Web approach develops languages for expressing information in a machine-processable form (“machine-understandable” in terms of the Semantic Web community). Particularly, the Resource Description Framework, RDF (Lassila & Swick, 1999), and RDF Schema, RDFS (Brickley & Guha, 2000), are considered as the foundations for the implementation of the Semantic Web. RDF provides a data model and a serialization language; RDFS a distinguished vocabulary to model class and property hierarchies and other basic schema primitives that can be referred to from RDF models, thereby allowing for the modeling of object models with cleanly defined semantics. The idea behind this approach is to provide a common minimal framework for the description of Web resources while allowing for application-specific extensions (Berners-Lee, 1998). Such extensions in terms of additional classes and/or properties must be documented in an application-specific schema. Application-specific schemata can be integrated into RDFS by the namespace mechanism (Bray, Hollander & Layman, 1999). Namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names used in RDF documents by associating them with namespaces identified by URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) references (Berners-Lee, Fielding, Irvine & Masinter, 1998).

A Semantically Advanced Querying Methodology for Medical Knowledge and Decision Support

A large part of all activities in healthcare deals with decision making regarding which examinations and tests need to be done or, on the basis of earlier examinations, which further tests need to be ordered. Recently, guidelines for an appropriateness and necessity indication of medical interventions have been elaborated and consulted in order to evaluate the quality of decisions in specific medical domains such as cardiology and hysterectomy.

Towards Improved Representation and Communication of Pharmaceutical Expert Information

The main concern of healthcare management has ever been embodied by two conflicting goals. These are improving care quality while reducing care costs. Information technology already has proven its positive impact on both goals. While general administrative tasks are being performed more efficiently for some decades, expert-oriented systems are entering the medical domain with increasing support capabilities for domain-specific therapeutic procedures, leading to more secure and efficient therapy planning, monitoring and control.

An Extensible Approach for Modeling Ontologies in RDF(S)

The development of the World Wide Web is about to mature from a technical platform that allows for the transportation of information from sources to humans (albeit in many syntactic formats) to the communication of knowledge from Web sources to machines. The knowledge food chain has started with technical protocols and preliminary formats for information presentation (HTML–HyperText Markup Language) over a general methodology for separating information contents from layout (XML–eXtensible Markup Language, XSL–eXtensible Stylesheet Language) to reach the realms of knowledge provisioning by the means of RDF and RDFS.

Secure Internet Access to Medical Data

In Holbein et al. (1997) and previous papers (Holbein & Teufel, 1995; Holbein et al., 1996), the concept of a context-dependent access control has been introduced and discussed exhaustively. A prototype implementation of the concept is described in Nitsche et al. (1998). The prototype implementation is for local use only and would reveal many security holes if used over an open network: The dynamic link library (DLL) that handles the access control, for instance, would be publicly accessible. In Nitsche et al. (1998), by spying out the DLL code, one could obtain information about the database’s administrator log-in procedure, possibly leaving the entire database unprotected. However, using technology different from that presented in Nitsche et al. (1998) allows one to come up with a secure distributed solution to context-dependent access control over the Internet.

Four Different Types of Classification Models

EDP stands for electronic data processing. Data bear imminent information–but what kind of information? The question becomes particularly apparent when a great deal of data is to be processed. In this case, the data have to be structured in order to give evidence of the information they bear. Thereby it is important: The primary data collected from a series of discrete observations are more comprehensive than any derived interpretation. They carry more information than any subsequent analysis or interpretation requires or can express.

Experience with a Functional-Logic Multi-Agent Architecture for Medical Problem Solving

The present paper reports on our experience with applying RELFUN (Boley, 1999) to problems in distributed medical care. This application arose “externally” in the original sense of the word: Massimiliano Campagnoli, working with the LISP-based expert-system shell KEE, supporting frames as well as forward and backward rules, noticed RELFUN on the net and switched to it, since frames are mappable into clauses and RELFUN’s rules offer more versatility than KEE’s. After his initial implementation of a RELFUN-based distributed medical-care system, he contacted the second author, further developing RELFUN, and the Pavia/Kaiserslautern teams joined forces, with the first author also being the expert in the medical domain.

The Concept of Knowledge Media

Knowledge is the internal state of humans that results from the input and processing of information during learning and performing tasks. According to Nonaka (1991), we can distinguish two kinds of knowledge: tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is highly personal and is deeply rooted in an individual’s actions and experience as well as in his ideas, values and emotions. This type of knowledge is difficult to formalize, to communicate, and to share. Explicit knowledge can be expressed independently from its human carrier in the form of data, scientific formulae, specifications, manuals, experience, project reports, and the similar. In its externalized form, “Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody–either by becoming grounds for action, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action” (Drucker, 1991). As a result, knowledge is considered the most valuable resource in the information age.

The Medical Journal Club - A Tool for Knowledge Refinement and Transfer in Healthcare

The information base for healthcare is rapidly expanding. There are more than 20,000 biomedical journals. Approximately 17,000 new biomedical books were published in 1990, and these were projected to increase by annually up to 7% (Sackett et al., 1996; Siegel, Cummings, & Woodsmall, 1990). With such an exponential increase in information, there is a need for effective and efficient strategies to keep up-to-date with clinically relevant new knowledge. Without current best evidence, medical practice risks becoming out-of-date, to the detriment of patients.

Poems in the Information Jungle - How Do Physicians Survive?

The days when newly graduated doctors were well equipped with the knowledge and information they would need during a lifetime are long since gone. Today’s clinicians’ knowledge becomes almost as rapidly outdated as the analysts’ forecasts on the stock market. Tsunamis of new articles reporting scientific achievements flood the shorelines of current knowledge. Modern physicians need to be lifelong learners in order to adapt to the rapidly evolving medical environment. But how can physicians survive in the information jungle? What are the tools they need to weave a fabric of best medical practice that is woven from the relevant scientific knowledge and the detailed information about the patients’ preferences? Are medical schools and the postgraduate educational systems preparing doctors for this?