Combining Personal Health Records and Relevant External Data Sources: A Way for Achieving New Outcomes for Personal Healthcare

摘要

Personal Health Records (PHRs) have the potential to dramatically contribute to healthcare as they enable patient to become more involved and engaged in their care. However, PHRs are rather limited in that they assume all its content to be restricted on health-oriented personal data. Yet there are a lot of related data that are stored in other systems, and which use together with PHRs' data would produce outcomes that could not be achieved by functioning independently. Using these data sources together with PHRs' data we can achieve new outcomes. How it can be carried out by using modern Semantic Web technologies, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL) and SPARQL, and our designated ontologies is the topic of this paper. We also introduce the notion of SPARQL-affinity domain, which allows the sharing of PHRs and other relevant data in a controlled way over the Internet.