Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 18, 2026
A Metadata Extraction Approach for Clinical Case Reports to Enable Advanced Understanding of Biomedical Concepts
Published on: September 20, 2018
OWLing Clinical Data Repositories With the Ontology Web Language
Raimundo Lozano-Rubí1, Xavier Pastor, Esther Lozano
1Hospital Clínic, Unit of Medical Informatics, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. rlozano@clinic.ub.es.
Background:
The health sciences are based upon information. Clinical information is usually stored and managed by physicians with precarious tools, such as spreadsheets. The biomedical domain is more complex than other domains that have adopted information and communication technologies as pervasive business tools. Moreover, medicine continuously changes its corpus of knowledge because of new discoveries and the rearrangements in the relationships among concepts. This scenario makes it especially difficult to offer good tools to answer the professional needs of researchers and constitutes a barrier that needs innovation to discover useful solutions.
Objective:
The objective was to design and implement a framework for the development of clinical data repositories, capable of facing the continuous change in the biomedicine domain and minimizing the technical knowledge required from final users.
Methods:
We combined knowledge management tools and methodologies with relational technology. We present an ontology-based approach that is flexible and efficient for dealing with complexity and change, integrated with a solid relational storage and a Web graphical user interface.
Results:
Onto Clinical Research Forms (OntoCRF) is a framework for the definition, modeling, and instantiation of data repositories. It does not need any database design or programming. All required information to define a new project is explicitly stated in ontologies. Moreover, the user interface is built automatically on the fly as Web pages, whereas data are stored in a generic repository. This allows for immediate deployment and population of the database as well as instant online availability of any modification.
Conclusions:
OntoCRF is a complete framework to build data repositories with a solid relational storage. Driven by ontologies, OntoCRF is more flexible and efficient to deal with complexity and change than traditional systems and does not require very skilled technical people facilitating the engineering of clinical software systems.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
01:45ER Retrieval Pathway
The ER uses many checkpoints to prevent the entry of incorrectly folded or a resident protein as cargo onto a transport vesicle. These mechanisms...
01:11Clinical Trials: Overview
01:16Clinical Trials
There are four phases in a clinical trial. A phase one...
01:19Purpose of Health Records II
01:27Nursing Clinical Information System
A Nursing Clinical Information System (NCIS) is a specialized type of healthcare information system tailored to meet the unique needs of nursing practice. It incorporates the principles of nursing informatics to streamline information management and improve the quality of care delivery.
Critical attributes of NCIS include:
01:08Data Collection by Observations
An astronomer viewing the motion and brightness of stars in the sky and recording the data is an example of observational data collection. A botanist recording...