Semantic Web Use Cases and Case Studies Case Study : A Semantic Web Content Repository for Clinical Research

Innovation in clinical research and bioinformatics has been severely hampered in part by the fragmented gathering and storing of data, reflecting the compartmentalization of medical science and practice. It has also been hampered by the programmatic necessity of keeping up with medical advances, which has led within every discipline to a multiplicity of special-purpose databases. Neither seamless integration nor simple extensibility of data stores is the norm. Yet to answer ad hoc questions cutting across disparate domains, clinical knowledge housed in isolated silos needs to be integrated. To make matters worse, typically clinical knowledge is expressed in ambiguous, idiosyncratic terminology. This is especially problematic for longitudinal patient data that can feasibly span multiple, geographically separated sources—pharmacies, local practices, group practices, and primary, secondary, and tertiary hospitals—and disciplines such as genetics, pathology, cardiology, etc. Without aid of a well-defined, standardized knowledge representation, the expense of ad hoc integration is formidable to impossible.