SWAT4LS2009 – Matthias Loebe: TIM A semantic web application for the specification of metadata items in clinical research

(Again, these are live notes as bullet points.)

Problems with the Specification of Clinical Trials

• Development of trial protocol
• Preparation of study centres
• Registration of patients etc…..
• Case report Forms capture data at different time points (lab results, therapy outcomes, treatment history etc..) relevant for answering clinical questions
• Misconceptions and misinterpretations of data occur frequently either through underspecification or lack of metadata

Benefits of Detailing and Reusing Items

• Efficiency
• Data Quality
• Metaanalysis

Requirements for an Item Data Model

• Expressiveness – Items consist of subitems
• Adaptable system of rules – validity and consistency checking
• Supporting context
• Providing views – facests. Different information requirements for different types ofusers.
• Exploiting conceptual relations
• Mapping to terminologies

Architecture of Trial Item Manager

• Application behaviour is ontology driven…
• working data stored as rdf in separate model
• multiple rdf models (combined, raw, inferred)

Showing the specification of various trial items in rdf…..and examples of the ontology driving the app…

Advantage of th Semantic Approach

• open linked data, referencability
• extensible rules
• user guidence using semantics but invisible to user
• rapid response to change
• import external item sets
• personalisation on a per-user/user type basis
• navigation
• semantic search

Caveats:

• Open world reasoning sometimes gives unexpected results…..;-)
• No unique name assumption
• Performance