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Technology has often been associated with improvements in many domains. This is particularly true in the medical and healthcare industry. This is a field where data collection is performed on a daily basis. With the advent of mobile technology, several methodologies for data collection have been adopted to reduce the cost and time expended on data collection. The focus of this paper is a proposed ontology-based framework that has the ability to build a shared repository of surveys that can be used for data collection. The paper discusses iCollect, a first instantiation of the framework in the form of a survey application built for the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) project.

The backbone of semantic web technologies is the ontology. This is a powerful structure, which allows for the capture, reasoning and storing of expert knowledge across various domains. Ideally these structures should be developed and implemented by experts in a set domain as well as designed with re-usability in mind. However, often due to the lack of availability and difficulties of discovering ontologies, these structures are repeatedly recreated. Current methods for storing, discovering and sharing ontologies employ similar techniques as to those used for software source code or static web pages. These are exposed to the limitation inherent with keyword-based searches, such as ambiguity with the keywords themselves and therefore, the most relevant ontology may not be discovered. This paper will examine some of the existing techniques used for the storing and sharing of ontologies. It will offer a contrasting method analogous to software libraries to develop a standard to store, share, discover, and distribute common ontologies.

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Compositional systems offer a unique opportunity to users who have domain expertise but lack the necessary skills to develop software solutions in their own domain. A subset of these systems are ontology driven compositional systems (ODCS). ODCS use ontological knowledge to help facilitate composition between individual compositional units. Since an ODCS is a technologically complex system where a majority of the emphasis is placed on the inner workings of the system, often the user interface is an afterthought. This paper focuses on the human issues related to developing a workflow management application by investigating the design principles behind an ODCS interface prototype.