Advanced Interoperability Techniques: Structure Mapping Service in CrowdHEALTH Project

INTRODUCTION: Due to healthcare information systems interoperability issues, health-related events may be missed. Numerous techniques based on medical standards and technologies have been recommended to address this challenge. Nevertheless, these techniques do not follow a holistic approach. AIM: The purpose of the paper is to present the structure mapping service which is developed in the context of the initial design of the interoperability solution of the CrowdHEALTH project. METHODS: In the CrowdHEALTH project, subcomponents responsible for providing the appropriate interoperability solution have been created with first the rule engine for the implementation of the business logic. Another subcomponent responsible for creating and managing the knowledge related to the link that exists between information structures, or mappings between them, is the Structure Mapping Service. The envisioned approach for structure mapping is based on ontology alignment. Besides, the Terminology Service is responsible for providing a set of operations on medical terminologies used for the coding of medical knowledge, which fills the information structures. RESULTS: Within the development of the Structure Mapping component, the Ontology alignment process will be automated. Two phases exist when using the structure mapping service: the training phase and the run-time phase. In the training phase ontologies are created and are aligned, and data maps between the use case (source) data sets and the HHR Manager classes (target) are formed. Afterward, these data maps can be stored in the knowledge base. In the runtime phase, queries can be made to the structure mapping component by the data converter. The structure mapping controller can then access the Knowledge Base to retrieve the appropriate mapping and transformations and provide these as a response to the query. CONCLUSIONS: The initial design of the advanced interoperability techniques is described with emphasis put to Structural Mapping service which can be easily deployed and seamlessly integrated into healthcare settings. This design will be assessed and further enriched during the project life circle.