Tomás Pariente Lobo

A collaborative decision framework for managing changes in e-Government services

Abstract Developing and maintaining e-Government services that can effectively deal with changes is a challenge for public administrations. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting an ontology-based approach that: (i) enables systematic response of e-Government systems to changes by applying formal methods for achieving consistency when a change is discovered; (ii) enables knowledgeable response of service designers and implementers to changes by utilizing design rationale knowledge. We argue that such a synthesis of systematic response to changes with knowledge to deal with them has a positive impact on the change management process. Evaluation of the proposed approach in three case studies let us develop useful propositions for practitioners, discuss policy implications and identify future research topics.

An Architecture for the Semantic Enhancement of Environmental Resources

The vision of a Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE) requires seamless access to environmental resources, including data, models and services. Standardization organizations like OGC and OASIS have laid the foundations for interoperability on a syntactic level for many aspects of distributed environmental information systems (e.g. OGC SWE for sensor information). At the same time, the EC has undertaken a considerable effort to commit European stakeholders to offering their environmental information in such a way that it is accessible by interested parties, both on the scientific level by supporting research projects, like ORCHESTRA and SANY, and on the legal level by introducing directives (such as the INSPIRE directive). This development, amongst others, has led to the present situation in which a large number of environmental information sources are available. However, to implement the vision of the SISE it is not enough to publish resources. Environmental information must be discoverable, and it must be ‘understandable’ in different contexts in order to be used effectively by parties of various thematic domains. Therefore, in order to foster the implementation of SISE, semantic interoperability is a necessary element. Key to semantic interoperability is the presence of meta-information which describes the concepts of the environmental resources. Producing this meta-information puts a heavy technological burden on the individual resource providers such that it seems unlikely that enough semantic meta-information will ever be made available to reach semantic interoperability and thus accomplish the vision of SISE unless other ways to provide this essential meta-information are found. In this paper we introduce an architecture, developed in the FP7 project TaToo (247893), which tries to overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing the possibility to easily annotate and rate environmental information resources, even by parties which do not own the resource, and transparently equipping this information with domain knowledge and thus enhancing discoverability and usability of resources with semantic technologies. The objective of the architecture is to seamlessly blend in with existing infrastructures by making use of de facto standards while offering support for discovery, annotation and validation of environmental resources through open interfaces.

Information enrichment using TaToo's semantic framework

The Internet is growing in a non-coordinated manner, where different groups continuously publish and update information, adopting a variety of standards, according to the specific domain of interest: from agriculture to ecology, from groundwater to climate change. This unconstrained and unregulated growth has proven to be very successful, as more information is made available, even more is being added, in a virtuous cycle of information accrual. At the same time, modern search engines make looking for information rather easy, with their overall performance being more than satisfactory for most users. Yet, searching and discovering information requires a good deal of expertise and pre-existing knowledge. That may not be a problem when a user searches for common assets using a generic-purpose search engine. But what happens when the user is trying to gather scientific information across boundaries (e.g. cross different disciplines, cross environmental domains, etc)? This asks for new approaches, methods and tools to close the discovery gap of information resources satisfying your specific request. This is exactly the challenge the TaToo project is heading to.

yourEHRM: Standard-based management of your personal healthcare information

The standardisation of the architecture of electronic healthcare records is essential for two reasons: i) the records are being used to support shared care among clinicians with different specializations; ii) the standardisation process eases the introduction of mobile technologies within and among countries between people who provide and receive healthcare. It is a common problem previously addressed in the literature that already existing EHR approaches often present interoperability issues that restrain their effective application, since the different system components do not share a common nomenclature, data types, message syntax and encoding rules. Hospitals cannot share the clinical information of the patient. yourEHRM architecture implements standards that enable the exchange of desired medical information. The solution is based on generic information models that conform to openEHR/EN13606 archetypes associated with concepts of well-known terminologies such as SNOMED-CT. Besides it offers the possibility to exchange information with other Hospital Information Systems (HIS) using Health Level 7 (HL7) Clinical Data Architecture (CDA), Continuity of Care Record (CCR), Continuity of Care Document (CCD) or virtual Medical Record (vMR) as the payload. The architecture also permits the integration of data coming from heterogeneous and fragmented healthcare information systems and devices into the EHR.

A semantic cloud infrastructure for data-intensive medical research

The European virtual physiological human initiative develops a platform, called VPH-Share, for understanding physiological processes in the human body in terms of anatomical structure and biophysical mechanisms. Besides storing, sharing, integrating and linking a wide variety of heterogeneous bio-medical datasets relevant to the VPH community, the project envisions the facilitation of a secure data infrastructure, as well as search and exploration facilities based on semantic technologies. The data infrastructure and management platform are built on top of a hybrid cloud environment. The data management platform offers tools that cover the whole life-cycle of datasets including integration, selection, semantic annotation and publishing datasets as a service. A comprehensive user interface enables end-users to search and to explore bio-medical data with support of semantic technologies, concealing the complexity of the underlying service environment. In this paper we describe the data infrastructure that has emerged in context of the project.

Cloud-Based Semantic Data Management for the VPH-Share Medical Research Community

The European VPH-Share project develops an integrated modular and generic framework for understanding physiological processes in the human body in terms of anatomical structure and biophysical mechanisms. One of the major challenges besides managing and sharing a wide variety of heterogeneous bio-medical data sources relevant to the VPH community is facilitating the search and exploration of these data using semantic technologies. The VPH-Share data infrastructure and management platform has been built on top of a Cloud-based service framework that can take advantage of both public and private IT resources. The data management platform offers tools that cover the whole life-cycle of data integration, selection, semantic annotation and publishing. A comprehensive user interface enables end users to search and explore bio-medical data with the support of semantic technologies, shielding them from the complexity of the underlying IT environment.

Approaching Cross-Domain Search in Environmental Applications – Towards Linked Data

TaToo – Tagging tool based on a semantic discovery framework, a project funded by the European Commission provides a web-based solution for easy and accurate discovery as well as tagging of environmental resources. The novelty relies on a semantic framework integrating different domain ontologies in a multi-domain and multilingual context. The underlying ontology framework, comprises besides the different domain ontologies (e.g. related to climate change, agro-environmental and anthropogenic impact domains) also concepts and methods to establish a mapping between the domain ontologies and so-called minimal environmental resource model (MERM). Together this forms a suitable and usable bridge ontology allowing a cross-domain discovery by using aligned ontologies concepts from different domains. The clear advantage for the end-user is that he is now able to find relevant information stemming from other domains, (like from impact of pollutant, climate change or temperature on human health) that he would not have found before but would be even more important to him that the ones only from his domain of expertise. The TaToo semantic framework extends cross-domain search evolving towards the Linked Data initiative by providing a linking functionality. The cross-domain search can be extended including in the search results also linked resources.

Integrating Product Information in the Pharmaceutical Sector

In recent years, increased attention has been paid to what is called semantic interoperability in eHealth, being the interoperable identification and description of drugs at its very core. In spite of the efforts toward having a common way to describe drugs, there is no universal nomenclature but several attempts like SNOMED CT (http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/) or the biomedical ontologies in OBO Foundry (http://www.obofoundry.org/) and BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org/). This chapter describes an approach that applies NeOn technology to bridge the gap between different ontologies describing pharmaceutical products.

A semantic nomenclature for the pharmaceutical sector based on networked ontologies

Knowledge intensive sectors, such as the pharmaceutical, have typically to face the problem of dealing with heterogeneous and vast amounts of information. In these scenarios discovery, integration and easy access to the knowledge are the most important factors. The use of semantics to classify meaningfully the information and to bridge the gap between the different representations that different stakeholders have is widely accepted [1]. The problem arises when the ontologies used to model the domain become too large and unmanageable. The current status of the technology does not allow to easily working with this type of ontologies. In this paper we propose the use of networked ontologies to solve these problems for the particular case scenario of the pharmaceutical sector in Spain. Instead of using a single ontology, the idea is to break the model in several meaningful pieces and bind them together using a networked ontology model for representing and managing relations between multiple ontologies. The Semantic Nomenclature is a case study that is currently under development in the NeOn1 EC funded FP6 project [2]. Our approach is that of the integration of the large quantity of information about pharmaceutical products provided by a wide range of actors in the Spanish pharmaceutical sector using networked ontologies. Cover the profound lack of systematization for creating, maintaining and updating drug-related information, the creation of a common reference ontology about drugs, the provision of easy mechanisms for discovery, model and mapping of new sources of information in a collaborative way, and the ability to reason on the context of user and ontologies in order to facilitate the mapping and retrieving processes, are among the main goal of this case study that will be further developed in the present paper.