SOMWeb: A Semantic Web-Based System for Supporting Collaboration of Distributed Medical Communities of Practice

Abstract

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.

Um Estudo sobre a Contribuição de Ontologias para a Educação suportada por Tecnologias da Informação no Domínio da Saúde

“…Considerando um sistema que proporciona a reunião de médicos, que estão geograficamente distantes e são especializados em Odontologia, para discutir casos clínicos, Falkman et al (2008) propõem um componente do sistema responsável por adicionar casos de uma forma estruturada, indicando casos relevantes para as reuniões e permitindo a pesquisa e recuperação de casos que já foram discutidos anteriormente. Estas reuniões permitem que médicos especializados e mais experientes compartilhem e disseminem seus conhecimentos, o que acaba se tornando um meio de aprendizagem para médicos menos experientes.…”

“…Nota-se que no artigo de Gao et al 2006, um dos três artigos representativos de 2006, o vocabulário que compõe a ontologia é utilizado no processo de anotação semântica de recursos digitais, visando promover a interoperabilidade semântica entre recursos de diferentes fontes. A ontologia é utilizada com os mesmos propósitos nos anos seguintes [Bratsas et al 2007, Falkman et al 2008, Alvino et al 2009, Evangelia et al 2011, Dias et al 2011, Bogdan 2011, Dovrolis et al 2011, Blaum et al 2013, Roth et al 2013e Dafti et al 2015. Dessa forma, a anotação semântica de recursos digitais, que no contexto da educação são conhecidos como objetos de aprendizagem, utilizando o vocabulário estruturado de ontologias é uma prática que se mantêm em vigor devido a capacidade da ontologia de estruturar um domínio, provendo os principais conceitos, propriedades e relacionamentos.…”

“…Finalmente, tendo em vista a eminente necessidade de gerenciamento de conhecimento por parte de diferentes softwares, abordagens e métodos computacionais com propósitos educacionais da área da saúde, os trabalhos de Boulos et al (2006), Albusaidi, Gray e Fiddian (2006), Bittencourt et al (2007), Falkman et al (2008), Alvino et al (2009), Carmody, Sherry e Cardiff (2010, Dias et al (2011), Bogdan (2011), Blaum et al (2013, Roth et al (2013) e Nakikj e Weng (2013) utilizam ontologias para representar informações de áreas da medicina, dados de pesquisas científicas, dados de pacientes ou de profissionais da área. A ideia é fornecer uma camada inteligente para que softwares, abordagens e métodos computacionais com propósitos educacionais sejam capazes, por exemplo, de fornecer informações sobre uma área específica da saúde ou de conhecer o perfil e as necessidades do seu público alvo.…”

Domain Ontology of the VirDenT System

“…OWL ontologies are used in SOMWeb to represent oral medicine templates and knowledge, as well as to represent community models and data [3].…”

Transforming medical imaging applications into collaborative PACS-based telemedical systems

“…It is equipped with tools for medical image processing and visualization and it provides video and audio conferencing capabilities.. SOMWeb [34] is another example of a collaborative system. SOMWeb is a semantic web-based system for supporting collaboration among distributed medical communities specifically for sharing complex oral medicine cases.…”