The Management and Integration of Biomedical Knowledge: Application in the Health-e-Child Project (Position Paper)

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of childrens health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases.