Ontology-Based Information Integration

Wache, H., Voegele, T., Visser, U., Stuckenschmidt, H., Schuster, G., Neumann, H., Hubner, S. Ontology-based integration of information—A survey of existing approaches. In IJCAI-01 Workshop Ontologies and Information Sharing, Citeseer, vol. 2001, pp. 108-117 (2001)... 

By integrating the cooperative work perspective to our NATURE based metamodel, we have been able to extend the PRIME process support in order to support the cross-functional interplay among developers. More precisely, PRIME is able to remotely trace the process enactment at several workplaces and transfer information from one to the other, when needed, using a shared ontology that obeys company policies and rules. In order to show the effectiveness of the distributed process support, we have implemented a tool called cooperation console that is able to visualize the workflow of elementary activities of the design process, provide information concerning its execution status, and to unfold the design history for each developer. 

The same flow of activities can be used with any different tool and document information. Depending on the degree of integration, the document content may be converted into the ontological format of the PDW (see also Subsect. 3.2.1 about fine-grained product relationships and conversions), or enriched and annotated based on a coarse-grained categorization model. While the former has been applied in the scenario described here, the latter concept is used in the TRAMP tool as described in Subsect. 4.1.4. 

The various sources from which the system that retrieves and integrates the health records will interact through the institutional gateway systems that secure the health records for the patient with privacy clearance and ensure that a standard ontology and data formats are observed. The institutional gateway systems also determine which health information can be shared and for what purposes based on the informed consent of the patient. The basic premise is that patients own their health records, so the healthcare professionals and healthcare institutions serve only as custodians of these health records. Their providing access to a patient s health records would be governed by the statutory requirements for protection of patients privacy. 

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