Semantically Enhanced Interoperability in Health Emergency Management

摘要

Health Emergency Management is a domain which involves a number of stakeholders operating under different protocols, rules, and languages forming a complex world where incident coordination and decision making is a vital requirement. The data that is used during a health emergency include heterogeneous datasets from various data sources. Thus, data harmonization techniques must be adopted against a common reference schema to assure data consistency. Moreover, the need for interoperability between the involved agencies at national and international level is strong. Currently, there is no reference schema which captures all the dimensions of the Health Emergency Management domain and also aligned with the common incident management interoperability protocols. The HERMES Semantic Model consists of an ontological representation of the conceptual model of the Health Emergency Management domain and aims at: (a) providing an integral conceptual model of Health Emergency Management covering all the involved knowledge domains and, (b) addressing the aforementioned interoperability and integration issues. HERMES reuses existing ontologies and offers a new upper model, a set of vertical models and a data facet. The model is used by a specific mechanism which imports data from the various resources in order to provide an integrated and homogenized view of the data. The final harmonized data may be used by various incident management platforms to assist in decision making during an emergency. Finally, the model and the data harmonization procedure are evaluated using open data from open data repositories. The results of the evaluation verify the correctness of the approach.