Semantic Web for Healthcare?

August 23, 2007

Is the semantic web or Web 3.0 coming to health care? In this blog on Government Health IT, there is a good explanation of the semantic web and some of the potential uses for healthcare.

“The equivalent Semantic Web technology is Resource Description Framework (RDF). Whereas HTML defines the location of data, RDF describes what that data is. Along with other technologies such as Web Ontology Language, RDF can be used to ascribe meaning to data depending on the context in which it is used.”

The potential uses are having intelligent agents find information in an increasingly dense and complex store of health information on the web for:

  • Physician decision support
  • bring condition-specific information to consumers
  • support health science research and finding medical images

This certainly makes sense for healthcare where complex ontologies and taxonomies exist and transforming the technical into lay language is essential.

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