Ontology-based Change Propagation in Shareable Health Information Applications

One of the most important challenges to be addressed when establishing an integrated smart health environment is the availability of shareable health data and knowledge which standardize the interoperability of components within the environment. Health ontologies are commonly utilized to enable interoperability between applications in such environment. However, the dynamic nature of health knowledge causes the need for frequent changes in health ontologies which then must be propagated to the relevant applications. A change propagation method that can efficiently streamline the change management from an ontology to all the applications which reference to it is proposed. A component called a mapper is used to manage the mapping between application terms and ontology concepts. The mapper is aimed to maintain the applications’ access to the most up-to-date ontology concepts and to improve the semantic mapping between the application terms and the ontology concepts. Some rules are developed for the change propagation process. The evaluation of the method shows that the mapper can improve the mapping list in terms of: (i) correctness, by proposing a new mapping entry to substitute an existing one which is not valid anymore because ontology concept is deleted or changed; (ii) currency maintenance, by recommending a better mapping between an application term and a new ontology concept based on the similarity value between the term and the new concept. Keywords—health information system; ontology-based application; ontology evolution