Publication, discovery and interoperability of Clinical Decision Support Systems: A Linked Data approach

Abstract

Background: The high costs involved in the development of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) make it necessary to share their functionality across different systems and organizations. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been proposed to allow reusing CDSS by encapsulating them in a Web service. However, strong barriers in sharing CDS functionality are still present as a consequence of lack of expressiveness of services' interfaces. Linked Services are the evolution of the Semantic Web Services paradigm to process Linked Data. They aim to provide semantic descriptions over SOA implementations to overcome the limitations derived from the syntactic nature of Web services technologies.

Objective: To facilitate the publication, discovery and interoperability of CDS services by evolving them into Linked Services that expose their interfaces as Linked Data.

Materials and methods: We developed methods and models to enhance CDS SOA as Linked Services that define a rich semantic layer based on machine interpretable ontologies that powers their interoperability and reuse. These ontologies provided unambiguous descriptions of CDS services properties to expose them to the Web of Data.

Results: We developed models compliant with Linked Data principles to create a semantic representation of the components that compose CDS services. To evaluate our approach we implemented a set of CDS Linked Services using a Web service definition ontology. The definitions of Web services were linked to the models developed in order to attach unambiguous semantics to the service components. All models were bound to SNOMED-CT and public ontologies (e.g. Dublin Core) in order to count on a lingua franca to explore them. Discovery and analysis of CDS services based on machine interpretable models was performed reasoning over the ontologies built.

Discussion: Linked Services can be used effectively to expose CDS services to the Web of Data by building on current CDS standards. This allows building shared Linked Knowledge Bases to provide machine interpretable semantics to the CDS service description alleviating the challenges on interoperability and reuse. Linked Services allow for building 'digital libraries' of distributed CDS services that can be hosted and maintained in different organizations.

Keywords: Clinical Decision Support; Linked Data; Medical ontologies; Semantic Web Service; Semantic interoperability; Service Oriented Architecture.