An ontology-based compliance audit framework for medical data sharing across Europe

Complying with privacy in multi-jurisdictional health domains is important as well as challenging. The compliance management process will not be efficient unless it manages to show evidences of explicit verification of legal requirements. In order to achieve this goal, privacy compliance should be addressed through “a privacy by design” approach. This paper presents an approach to privacy protection verification by means of a novel audit framework. It aims to allow privacy auditors to look at past events of data processing effectuated by healthcare organisation and verify compliance to legal privacy requirements. The adapted approach used semantic modelling and a semantic reasoning layer that could be placed on top of hospital databases. These models allow the integration of fine-grained context information about the sharing of patient data and provide an explicit capturing of applicable privacy obligation. This is particularly helpful for insuring a seamless data access logging and an effective compliance checking during audit trials

AUCTORITAS: Una herramienta basada en la Web Semántica para el Control de Autoridades

El control de autoridades está reconocido como una tarea compleja en el proceso de catalogación. Esta es un área de investigación activa en el presente para bibliotecas e instituciones de investigación relacionadas aun cuando varias aproximaciones se han propuesto para la temática. En este trabajo proponemos AUCTORITAS, una herramienta que brinda servicios de alto valor en la Web para apoyar el proceso de control de autoridades en un ambiente institucional genérico. Este artí­culo describe los servicios Web de AUCTORITAS, su modelo de acceso a datos basado en ontologí­as y cómo los lenguajes de la Web Semántica hacen posible la integración de fuentes de datos heterogéneas

Provision of an integrated data analysis platform for computational neuroscience experiments

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrated analysis base to facilitate computational neuroscience experiments, following a user-led approach to provide access to the integrated neuroscience data and to enable the analyses demanded by the biomedical research community. Design/methodology/approach – The design and development of the N4U analysis base and related information services addresses the existing research and practical challenges by offering an integrated medical data analysis environment with the necessary building blocks for neuroscientists to optimally exploit neuroscience workflows, large image data sets and algorithms to conduct analyses. Findings – The provision of an integrated e-science environment of computational neuroimaging can enhance the prospects, speed and utility of the data analysis process for neurodegenerative diseases. Originality/value – The N4U analysis base enables conducting biomedical data analyses by indexing and interlinking the neuroimaging and clinical study data sets stored on the grid infrastructure, algorithms and scientific workflow definitions along with their associated provenance information

Ontology-driven relational query formulation using the semantic and assertional capabilities of OWL-DL

This work investigates the extent to which domain knowledge, expressed in a domain ontology, can assist end-users in formulating relational queries that can be executed over a complex relational database. In this regard, an ontology-driven query formulation architectural framework has been devised, namely OntoQF, that implements a two-phased approach - the pre-processing and translation phases. In the pre-processing phase, a new database-to-ontology transformation approach has been synthesised where domain ontology is populated and enriched with problem domain concepts and semantic relationships specified using OWL-DL. Once domain ontology has been formulated, end-users can write sophisticated ontology-based queries that are then translated, in the translation phase, into the corresponding relational query statements. In order to validate the correctness of translating single or multiple OWL-DL constructs into their corresponding relational ones, a set of test cases have been derived from the medical domain. Our results demonstrated that the OntoQF framework enriches domain ontology and its associated algorithms drive the process of relational query formulation without the need to both replicate transactional data into the associated domain ontology and have knowledge of the underlying database schema. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

OntoIntegra: Método para la integración de datos almacenados en fuentes heterogéneas.

Data sources integration is about interconnecting and accessing heterogeneous data sources. With the evolution of the organizations, this topic has become an important research field both for academy and industry. The project “Information and Communication Technologies supporting the educational process and the knowledge management in higher education” (ELINF) needs to integrate heterogeneous data sources for supporting the authority control process in its software. This work aims to develop a method with semantic components to contribute to the integration of authority control related data, required by the ELINF project, which is stored in heterogeneous data sources into a software. The current research describes the developed method. At the same time, it describes the study case used for validating it, through the comparison of a software application developed without the proposed method and another one instantiating the method regarding to its capacity to integrate heterogeneous data sources

Análise de tipos de ontologias nas áreas de ciência da informação e ciência da computação

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Ciências da Educação, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação, Florianópolis, 2014.A emergência de tecnologias que visam complementar a web, associada às problemáticas na busca por novos modelos de recuperação de informação mais eficientes, abriram espaço para estudos que utilizam os benefícios da organização semântica da informação e do conhecimento. Sistemas de Organização do Conhecimento (SOCs) permitem representar um domínio por meio da sistematização dos conceitos e das relações semânticas que se estabelecem entre eles. Entre os tipos desses sistemas conceituais estão as ontologias, utilizadas para representar o conhecimento relativo a um dado domínio do conhecimento. A presente pesquisa tem como objetivo, por meio de uma pesquisa documental, identificar as principais características dos tipos de ontologias. Para tanto, foi empregado, nos procedimentos metodológicos, o método de Análise de Conteúdo de Laurence Bardin. Para a construção do corpus de análise foram utilizadas as bases de dados da Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) e da Computer and Information Systems Abstracts. A análise dos resultados permitiu identificar um predomínio significativo nas pesquisas relacionadas às ontologias de domínio, utilizando-a como ferramenta para representação de conceitos e relações que estejam inseridas na visão de mundo desejada. Diferentemente, as ontologias de topo definem os conceitos mais básicos e que sejam extensíveis a outras ações e domínios associados a sua área de abordagem. Os tipos aplicação e tarefa permitem um nível de representação mais específico, alinhado a modelagem de ambientes particulares.Abstract : The emergence of technologies that aim at complementing the internet, associated with the problematics that arise in the search for new models of information retrieval that are more efficient, have made room for studies that make use of the benefits of the semantic organization of information and knowledge. Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) allow the representation of a domain through the systematization of concepts and semantic relations that have been stablished between them. Among these forms of conceptual systems are the ontologies, utilized in the representation of knowledge relative to a given knowledge domain. The goal of this research, therefore, is to identify the main characteristics of the types of ontologies through documentary research. For that, we have employed in the methodological procedures the Laurence Bardin Content Analysis Method. As for the corpus analysis construction we made use of the databases of the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) and Computer and Information Systems Abstracts. The analysis of the results allowed the identification of a significant predominance of researches related to domain ontologies, they were used as tools for the representation of concepts and relations that are inserted in the desired world view. In contrast, top level ontologies define the most basic concepts that are extendable to other actions and domains associated to its approach area. The application and task types allow a representation that is more specific and alligned with the modeling of particular environments

Exploiting a perdurantist foundational ontology and graph database for semantic data integration

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University London.The view of reality that is inherent to perdurantist philosophical ontologies, often termed four dimensional (4D) ontologies, has not been widely adopted within the mainstream of information system design practice. However, as the closed world of enterprise systems is opened to Internet scale Semantic Web and Open Data information sources, there is a need to better understand the semantics of both internal and external data and how they can be integrated. Philosophical foundational ontologies can help establish this understanding and there is, therefore, an emerging need to research how they can be applied to the problem of semantic data integration. Therefore, a prime objective of this research was to develop a framework through which to apply a 4D foundational ontology and a graph database to the problem of semantic data integration, and to assess the effectiveness of the approach. The research employed design science, a methodology which is applicable to undertaking research within information systems as it encompasses methods through which the research can be undertaken and the resultant artefacts evaluated. This methodology has a number of discrete stages: problem awareness; a core design-build-evaluate iterative cycle through which the research is conducted; and a conclusion stage. The design science research was conducted through the development of a number of artefacts, the prime being the 4D-Semantic Extract Load (4D-SETL) framework. The effectiveness of the framework was assessed by applying it to semantically interpret and integrate a number of large scale datasets and to instantiate a prototype graph database warehouse to persist the resultant ontology. A series of technical experiments confirmed that directly reflecting the model patterns of 4D ontology within a prototype data warehouse proved an effective means of both structuring and semantically integrating complex datasets and that the artefacts produced by 4D-SETL could function at scale. Through illustrative scenario, the effectiveness of the approach is described in relation to the ability of the framework to address a number of weaknesses in current approaches. Furthermore the major advantages of the 4D-SETL are elaborated; which include ability of the framework is to combine foundational, domain and instance level ontological models in a single coherent system that dispensed with much of the translation normally undertaken between conceptual, logical and physical data models. Additionally, adopting a perdurantist realist foundational ontology provided a clear means of establishing and maintaining the identity of physical objects as their constituent temporal and spatial parts unfold over the course of tim

An interactive metaheuristic search framework for software serviceidentification from business process models

In recent years, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) model of computing has become widely used and has provided efficient and agile business solutions in response to inevitable and rapid changes in business requirements. Software service identification is a crucial component in the production of a service-oriented architecture and subsequent successful software development, yet current service identification methods have limitations. For example, service identification methods are either not sufficiently comprehensive to handle the totality of service identification activities, or they lack computational support, or they pay insufficient attention to quality checks of resulting services. To address these limitations, comprehensive computationally intelligent support for software engineers when deriving software services from an organisation’s business process models shows great potential, especially when the impact of human preference on the quality of the resulting solutions can be incorporated. Accordingly, this research attempts to apply interactive metaheuristic search to effectively bridge the gap between business and SOA technology and so increase business agility.A novel, comprehensive framework is introduced that is driven by domain independent role-based business process models, and uses an interactive metaheuristic search-based service identification approach based on a genetic algorithm, while adhering to SOA principles. Termed BPMiSearch, the framework is composed of three main layers. The first layer is concerned with processing inputs from business process models into search space elements by modelling input data and presenting them at an appropriate level of granularity. The second layer focuses on identifying software services from the specified search space. The third layer refines the resulting services to map the business elements in the resulting candidate services to the corresponding service components. The proposed BPMiSearch framework has been evaluated by applying it to a healthcare domain case study, specifically, Cancer Care and Registration (CCR) business processes at the King Hussein Cancer Centre, Amman, Jordan.Experiments show that the impact of software engineer interaction on the quality of the outcomes in terms of search effectiveness, efficiency, and level of user satisfaction, is assessed. Results show that BPMiSearch has rapid search performance to positively support software engineers in the identification of services from role-based business process models while adhering to SOA principles. High-quality services are identified that might not have been arrived at manually by software engineers. Furthermore, it is found that BPMiSearch is sensitive and responsive to software engineer interaction resulting in a positive level of user trust, acceptance, and satisfaction with the candidate services