Knowledge sharing and information integration in healthcare using ontologies and deductive databases

This paper describes a method for using Semantic Web technologies for sharing knowledge in healthcare. It combines deductive databases and ontologies, so that it is possible to extract knowledge that has not been explicitly declared within the database. A representation of the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) Semantic Network and Metathesaurus was created using the RDF standard, in order to represent the basic medical ontology. The inference over the knowledge base is done by the TRI-DEDALO System, a deductive database created to query and update RDF based knowledge sources as well as conventional relational databases. Finally, an ontology was created for the Brazilian National Health Card data interchange format, a standard to capture and transmit health encounter information throughout the country. This paper demonstrates how this approach can be used to integrate heterogeneous information and to answer complex queries in a real world environment.