Semantic Services and the Business Need: Looking Beyond the Healthcare Vertical
 

Fundamental advances in the technology for computable semantics during the last decade have yielded promising results when applied to biomedical and clinical informatics. Although much of this work occurs in the context of research efforts, the simultaneous use of common Internet technologies by the semantic web community and the SOA community has created new opportunities for applications. Several areas are reviewed that have proved to be important in current practice and which offer promising opportunities for near term benefits related directly to OMG work on modeling and services. Meeting these challenges will prove critical to achieving healthcare service architectures that advance the practice of evidence based medicine.
 

James St. Clair

Senior Director, Interoperability and Standards,

HIMSS

Elisa Kendall

Principal,

Thematix Partners, LLC

Gerald Beuchelt

Project Software Systems Engineer,
The MITRE Corporation

Peter Young

General Manager Health & Community Services

Database Consultants Australia (DCA)

Developed through the Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP), Common Terminology Services Release 2 (CTS2) has been created as a standard for shared semantic model and API for the query, interchange and update of terminological content. As an application programming interface specification, CTS 2 is a "blueprint" for building and using software to enable interoperability between CTS 2 clients and services. We will explore how CTS 2 came to be, where it is today and where it is heading.
 

Dr. Kensaku Kawamoto
Director, Knowledge Management and Mobilization
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics
University of Utah

The OMG/HL7 Clinical Decision Support Service standard provides a standard interface for integrating advanced clinical decision support (CDS) capabilities into electronic health record systems and other health information systems. Coupled with the HL7 Virtual Medical Record specification, which provides a standard information model for CDS, the Clinical Decision Support Service standard could facilitate the widespread integration of advanced CDS capabilities across the healthcare system. In this session, Dr. Kawamoto will provide an overview of these standards and describe the multi-institutional OpenCDS initiative (www.opencds.org), which provides an open-source, service-oriented CDS platform that is compliant with the Clinical Decision Support Service and Virtual Medical Record standards. Dr. Kawamoto will demonstrate the current version of the software, which is freely available under an Apache 2.0 open-source license, and he will highlight notable projects being undertaken by a variety of OpenCDS contributors.
 

This presentation will discuss how UML modeling tools could be used to accelerate and simplify the SOA standards development process and promote adoption and reuse of technology-specific components based on HSSP SOA specifications. UML modeling tools have been adopted very quickly by standards development organizations in healthcare to support requirements gathering, their analysis, standard design, and code generation for pilot projects.

Presentation focus will be on on best practices that promote and accelerate standards development through the application of various features of the tools to meet the specific needs of HSSP volunteers.
 

Researchers have turned to the Semantic Web to annotate and integrate disparate knowledge. Ontologies provide the domain knowledge to drive these processes and the successful creation of semantic applications in the healthcare and life sciences require Web services that provide access to ontologies. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), a National Center for Biomedical Computing created under the NIH Roadmap, developed BioPortal, which provides access to one of the largest repositories of biomedical ontologies (http://bioportal.bioontology.org). The ontology content is programmatically accessible via a suite of Web services for use in applications, such as data annotation to natural language processing. There are three types of NCBO Web services: (1) services that provide access to ontologies, (2) services that use ontologies to annotate data, and (3) services that provide access to ontology-based annotations.
 

WORKSHOP AND TUTORIAL - 1445 - 1730
Presentation of the Common Terminology Services Release Toolkit

Kevin Peterson, B.S.

Senior Analyst Programmer, Department of Biomedical Informatics,

Mayo Clinic

A demonstration of running CTS2 REST implementation with examples of how it can be used for browsing, searching, forms completion, mapping and incremental versioning and updates.
  

Kevin Peterson

Senior Analyst Programmer, Department of Biomedical Informatics,

Mayo Clinic

The CTS2 Development Framework is a toolkit for rapidly creating CTS2 implementations. CTS2 implementations are not one-size-fits-all -- they often depend on varying use cases, legacy data sources, special security concerns, etc. Using the CTS2 Development Framework, we will see what makes up a CTS2 implementation, what has been done for you, and what is left up to you, and will demonstrate how existing data sources (such as the NCBO Bioportal and LexEVS) can be leveraged to create CTS2 implementations.
 

Russ Hamm

Informatics Architect,
Apelon, Inc.

Terminology services provide the means by which applications can utilize and interoperate among standard and local terminology sets. The standardization of the Common Terminology Services - Release 2 terminology service through the Health Level Seven and OMG communities has defined a functional contract for terminology enabled applications and users. This presentation outlines the experience of the evolution of the CTS 2 specification thorough two separate but collaborating standards communities, and the benefits and challenges involved.
 

Kevin Peterson, B.S.

Senior Analyst Programmer, Department of Biomedical Informatics,

Mayo Clinic

As CTS2 moves forward, we will explore how new use-cases are driving future development. Development around RDF, including Reasoning and the development of a CTS2 to RDF map will be addressed as a primary topic. Also, planned additions to the Development Framework regarding RDF, extensibility, and more will be discussed. Find out how these and other developments may add extra value to future CTS2 implementations.