Reconciliation of Dynamic Medical Knowledge Organizing Systems (DynaMO)

Information systems exploiting semantic technologies are numerous nowadays. The medical and biomedical domains do not escape this revolution. Actually, institutions like hospitals or biobanks which make available biospecimen for researchers requires such technologies to associate biospecimen with digital data in order to make the semantic of the data explicit to promote data sharing and data exchange. However, medical and biomedical domains are highly dynamic and the knowledge of these domains are constantly evolving over time. In consequence, models for representing this knowledge like ontologies, thesauri, terminologies or more generally speaking knowledge organizing systems (KOS) that are the heart of information systems need to smoothly follow as faithfully as possible the evolution of the underlying domain otherwise, information systems will not be exploitable anymore.

Moreover, by virtue of the size of the medical domain several knowledge organizing systems are necessary to obtain the largest coverage possible. This is why mappings between the existing termino-ontological resources are defined. However, evolution of one of the knowledge organizing systems can impact directly on existing mappings therefore, new techniques and tools are required to ensure consistency between the aligned knowledge organizing systems. This maintenance of mappings must take into account all specificities of the underlying domain as well as the structure and format of the involved knowledge organizing systems.

In this context, the DynaMO project aims at investigating open research issues dealing with medical knowledge organizing systems evolution. As depicted in the picture below, the following issues will be studied:

• Understanding the evolution of medical knowledge organizing systems to be able to characterize the various aspects of the evolution process as well as to conceptualize and formalize the identified components of evolution.
• Understanding the impact of evolution on the dependent artifacts (i.e. mappings, data …) in order to propose a mechanism for maintaining the mappings.

More particularly, the objectives of the project consist in the definition of a formal framework to:

• Support medical knowledge organizing systems evolution in a consistent way,
• Support the maintenance of mappings directly impacted by knowledge organizing systems local evolution,
• Guarantee the consistency of the underlying data and information systems exploiting knowledge organizing systems elements after evolution.

The development of a tool supporting the overall approach is also foreseen.

May 2011 - May 2014

For any additional information please contact Cédric Pruski.

This project is developed in collaboration with the IASI team of the LRI, CNRS and Paris-Sud 11 University.

The DynaMO project is entirely supported by the National Research Fund, Luxembourg

J. C. Dos Reis, C. Pruski, M. Da Silveira, C. Reynaud-Delaître, Analyzing and Supporting the Mapping Maintenance Problem in Biomedical Knowledge Organization Systems. Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Interoperability in Medical Informatics (SIMI2012), Heraklion (Greece), 2012