Research Information System
International Journal of Scientific and Technological Research, vol.5, no.4, pp.146-156, 2019 (Refereed Journals of Other Institutions)
Retrieving the information needed for right clinical decision and searching through a large amount of
data are important challenges that health information systems encountered despite the advances in the
information systems. In order to reuse these distributed data, the health information standards are
developed to enable interoperable health information systems. As the standards are far from the necessary
semantics, the data defined according to these standards are not been efficiently used by machines.
Semantic Web technologies provide a common framework to access and process the information by
machines with the support of ontologies. The heterogeneous and distributed nature of health data makes
it a very suitable candidate to define health domain specific ontologies. In this work, a methodology for
defining health ontologies, which should work as information base of a health information system as the
next stage, is proposed to ensure interoperability and reuse between health information systems with the
support of health information standards. Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory Ontology (CBLO) is given as
a use case to model information of laboratory tests realized in clinical biochemistry laboratory that are a
sub-domain of medical laboratory tests. In addition, a weighted evaluation for the proposed methodology
is presented.