Towards the Representation of Network Assets in Health Care Environments Using Ontologies.

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Health Informatics
• Network Security

Background:

• Distributed healthcare environments generate sensitive network asset data.
• Current data interchange methods lack standardization and security.
• Ontologies offer a formal knowledge representation for data integration.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design an ontology model for representing assets and features in distributed healthcare settings.
• To facilitate information interchange using ontology-based vocabularies.
• To improve network security and threat understanding in healthcare.

Main Methods:

• Developed the "Software Defined Networking Description Language-CUREX Asset Discovery Tool Ontology" (SDNDL-CAO).
• Utilized ontology principles (subject-predicate-object triples) for knowledge representation.
• Ensured compliance with FAIR principles for sensitive healthcare data.

Main Results:

• The SDNDL-CAO ontology successfully represents key network asset concepts (interface, device, port, service).
• Ontology enables federated queries across multiple healthcare data sources.
• Provides a clear understanding of potential network threats.

Conclusions:

• The SDNDL-CAO ontology effectively models distributed healthcare environments.
• Enables real-time monitoring of emerging network threats for administrators.
• Crucial for enhancing the security of personal medical information.