Background Information technology (IT) support for remote collaboration of geographically distributed communities of practice (CoP) in health care must deal with a number of sociotechnical aspects of communication within the community. In the mid-1990s, participants of the Swedish Oral Medicine Network (SOMNet) began discussing patient cases in telephone conferences. The cases were distributed prior to the conferences using PowerPoint and email. For the technical support of online CoP, Semantic Web technologies can potentially fulfill needs of knowledge reuse, data exchange, and reasoning based on ontologies. However, more research is needed on the use of Semantic Web technologies in practice.Objectives The objectives of this research were to (1) study the communication of distributed health care professionals in oral medicine; (2) apply Semantic Web technologies to describe community data and oral medicine knowledge; (3) develop an online CoP, Swedish Oral Medicine Web (SOMWeb), centered on user-contributed case descriptions and meetings; and (4) evaluate SOMWeb and study how work practices change with IT support.Methods Based on Java, and using the Web Ontology Language and Resource Description Framework for handling community data and oral medicine knowledge, SOMWeb was developed using a user-centered and iterative approach. For studying the work practices and evaluating the system, a mixed-method approach of interviews, observations, and a questionnaire was used.Results By May 2008, there were 90 registered users of SOMWeb, 93 cases had been added, and 18 meetings had utilized the system. The introduction of SOMWeb has improved the structure of meetings and their discussions, and a tenfold increase in the number of participants has been observed. Users submit cases to seek advice on diagnosis or treatment, to show an unusual case, or to create discussion. Identified barriers to submitting cases are lack of time, concern about whether the case is interesting enough, and showing gaps in one’s own knowledge. Three levels of member participation are discernable: a core group that contributes most cases and most meeting feedback; an active group that participates often but only sometimes contribute cases and feedback; and a large peripheral group that seldom or never contribute cases or feedback.Conclusions SOMWeb is beneficial for individual clinicians as well as for the SOMNet community. The system provides an opportunity for its members to share both high quality clinical practice knowledge and external evidence related to complex oral medicine cases. The foundation in Semantic Web technologies enables formalization and structuring of case data that can be used for further reasoning and research. Main success factors are the long history of collaboration between different disciplines, the user-centered development approach, the existence of a “champion” within the field, and nontechnical community aspects already being in place.

This paper describes how Semantic Web technologies have been used in an online community for knowledge sharing between clinicians in oral medicine in Sweden. The main purpose of this community is to serve as repository of interesting and difficult cases, and as a support for monthly teleconferences. All information regarding users, meetings, news, and cases is stored in RDF. The community was built using the Struts framework and Jena was used for interacting with RDF.

We present a research program for identifying, modeling, and making use of generic pragmatic patterns for clinical knowledge management that support evidence-based medicine (EBM). Part of this program is SOMWeb, a system based on Semantic Web technologies, which is used for knowledge sharing and dissemination within an oral medicine community. A study of the use of SOMWeb has been conducted as the first step in the elicitation of important contextual factors and communicative activities involved in knowledge sharing processes in oral medicine. One such activity, community discussion activation, is described using consultation patterns together with the collaboration patterns of [5]. The general need for context-aware health information systems and the prospective use of approaches within Pragmatic Web in the pursuit of EBM are also discussed.

No abstract