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Healthcare Informatics Landscapes, Roadmaps, and Blueprints: Towards a Business Case Strategy for Large

Scale Ontology ProjectsPanel Discussion

Brand Niemann (US EPA), Chair,Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)

Best Practices Committee (BPC), CIO CouncilAugust 25, 2005

http://web-services.gov/ and http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoP

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Talking Points

• Thank you for the invitation to participate and I have appreciated the organization of this panel by Rex Brooks and the presentations of those that have proceeded me.

• I feel that the Ontolog/SICoP partnership has been advancing the business case in this topic area for over a year now and we are poised for a breakthrough.– Our meeting with ONCHIT, July 25th was a significant milestone

and we are on the “high ground leading the way forward” in a way they will come to more fully appreciate.

• My first suggestion is to lead with interoperability (not integration) as the problem we are trying to solve and large scale ontology does that in an agile, adaptive, data-driven way.

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Talking Points(continued)

• My second point is that standards generally fail in their implementation and so our fostering of pilots and early implementors is critical, so please continue to send us your suggestions for our workshop and conference agendas.– As ZapThink (considered to be the Gartner of SOA) says: We need to

move beyond explaining what SOA is and show how to do it. (I think the same principle applies to large scale ontologies for interoperability.)

• My third point is that cultivating Strategic Alliances are critical for the success of our Business Case: e.g., Markle Foundation, Esther Dyson, Perot Systems, Oracle, etc.

• My final point is that agree with the Australian E-Health Framework’s data-driven approach to interoperability because “it is a more sustainable than a connectivity-driven approach in a changing environment” and suggest that a key part of our business case be a Health Informatics Interoperability Profile consisting of a hierarchy of connected ontologies to be put forward in the FEA DRM activity.

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Overview

• 1. A Bit of History:– Meeting with ONCHIT, July 25, 2005.

• 2. Integration Versus Interoperability:– Ontology does agile interoperability!

• 3. The Data Reference Model:– Ontology is a significant part of it!

• 4. Opportunities and Challenges:– How we make the business case.

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1. A Bit of History

• Meeting with ONCHIT, July 25, 2005:– SICoP and the Ontolog Form Partnered on Semantic

Interoperability in Mid-2004 and Responded to the ONCHIT RFI in February 2005.

– SICoP/Ontolog Delivered Two Pilot Projects to ONCHIT in First Half of 2005.

– SICoP Participated in the NHIN RFI Response Review Task Force.

– CIO Council and FEA/OMB Encouraged SICoP/Ontolog to Pilot Executable Integration of the FEA Reference Models in Composite Applications (Business Ontology) with Individual Agencies.

– GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions Adds Health IT Analyst (Marc Wine) to Support FEA, FHA, SICoP, Ontolog, etc.

– SICoP/Ontolog Pilots Continue (see slides 6 and 7).

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1. A Bit of History

• Some Past Presentations:– July 19, 2005 (Collaboration Expedition Workshop):

• Building a Hospital Incident Reporting Ontology (HIRO) in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) Using the JCAHO Patient Safety Event Taxonomy (PSET), Liju Fan, KEVRIC, et al.

• Health Information Technology Interoperability Coordination, Marc Wine, GSA.

– June 13, 2005 (First DRM Public Forum):• An RDF Data Model for the Semantic Web (5th Oracle Life

Sciences User Group Meeting, May 16-17, 2005), Susie Stephens, Oracle.

• Evolving Data Models & Standards: Collaborating to Achieve Semantic Interoperability ... (from ISO 11179, ebXML Core Components, UBL, HL7, UML ... to UML2/OCL, RDF, OWL, OWL-S, SWRL, SUMO, DOLCE, SCL and other emerging semantic web services technologies and standards, PeterYim, Co-Convenor of the Ontolog Forum.

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1. A Bit of History

• Some Past Presentations (continued):– December, 9, 2004 (Collaboration Expedition

Workshop):• Standard Vocabularies in Health Care, Kathy Lesh, Kevric.• Building ontologies from the ground up: When users set out

to model their professional activity, Mark Musen, Stanford Medical Informatics.

– Also presented at the ArchitecturePlus Seminar, January 18, 2005.

• Artemis Project: A Semantic Web Service-based P2P Infrastructure for the Interoperability of Medical Information Systems, Professor Asuman Dogac, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

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2. Integration Versus Interoperability• Integration:

– Participant systems are assimilated into a larger whole

– Systems must conform to a specific way of doing things

– Connections (physical and logical) are brittle

– Rules are programmed in custom code, functions, or scripts

– Standard data vocabularies are encouraged

• Interoperability:– Participant systems remain

autonomous and independent

– Systems may share information without strict standards conformance

– Connections (physical and logical) are loosely coupled

– Rules are modeled in schemas, domain models, and mappings

– Local data vocabularies are encouraged

Source: Semantic Information Interoperability in Adaptive Information, byJeffrey Pollack and Ralph Hodgson, Wiley Inter-Science, 2004, page 38.

See for example “Australia releases e-health framework,” FCW.Com, August 22, 2005 (4th paragraph).

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3. Data Reference Model• September 14th Second Public Forum Structure:

– Phase 1: Taxonomy – Information Sharing Tool Kit – Part 1: SVG (June 28 and September 14)

– Phase 2: Metadata Interoperability – Information Sharing Tool Kit – Part 2: RDF (August 16)

– Phase 3: Executable Data Interoperability – Information Sharing Tool Kit – Part 3: Ontology (June 13 and September 14)

• Building Composite Applications with Multiple Ontologies, Digital Harbor (confirmed).

• Collaborative Ontology Development Server - Multi-User Protégé with Oracle backend, Peter Yim and Mark Musen (and Frank Hartel, NCICB?) (confirmed).

– See Oracle Plug-in for BioOntologies at http://www.oracle.com/technology/industries/life_sciences/index.html

• Social Security Administration’s PolicyNet, Duane Degler, SSA (confirmed).• Modeling Documents (FEA Records Management Profile Pilot) with

SiberSafe FKM (Formal Knowledge Management), SiberLogic (invited).• Cerebra Integration with the Oracle RDF Data Model (invited):

– See Collaborative Healthware Case Study at http://www.cerebra.com/downloads/case_study_CST.pdf

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4. Opportunities and Challenges• Upcoming Conferences:

– September 30, 2005, Personal Health Information Workshop, New York City, NY (Esther Dyson)

• See http://www.release1-0.com/events• Also see “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags” and respond!

– October 27, 2005, National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), Gala Inaugural Event, Buffalo, NY. Invited Presentation "Towards e-Government: The Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Model Ontology:

• See http://ncor.us/– November 17-18, 2005, The Government Health IT Conference &

Exhibition (Panel Session Proposal Submitted):• See http://www.e-gov.com/events/2005/ghit/

• Collaboration Workshops and DRM Public Forums:– November 8th and December 6th and 2006.

• Submit a proposal!• “Larger, more complex organizations should do nothing that cannot

be done as well and as cost-effectively by smaller and simpler organizations” (“Australia releases e-health framework,” FCW.Com, August 22, 2005).