Monday, 5/21/2007
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Level: Technical - Advanced

Next generation public health information systems will no longer be isolated and specialized to address particular needs within the boundaries of a single department or user group. Rather, they will be part of a larger, complex and dynamically changing collaborative environment. Healthcare providers such as hospitals, pharmacies, clinical laboratories, and departments of health, will need to seamlessly interoperate and integrate with systems across organizations. Although the Semantic Web provides a theoretically acceptable framework to enable such a vision, the state of the art is inadequate to meet the demands of such large scale implementations. Integrative Biosurveillance is a University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) project that demonstrates the application of the Semantic Web and benchmarks available technologies to support such large scale implementations. The project prompted a fruitful collaboration with Oracle Corporation to identify the characteristics of a scalable and robust Semantic Web application platform. We report on the architectural design and technology implications of our implementation. We suggest that a strong academic and industrial collaboration is necessary to overcome the bottlenecks and hurdles of applying Semantic Web technology to solve real world and complex problems.

Narendra Kunapareddy is Instructor of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Medicine. He is also a Health Information Solutions Architect at The Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research, where he plays a critical role in analysis, design and implementation of advanced and innovative algorithms and processes to find aberrations and unexpected patterns in public health data. He also leads the Semantic Web technology efforts at the center in the architecture and design of these systems and by collaborating with various partners in this domain. His current research focuses on automating ontology learning from incoming data in a health information exchange and integration platform where a specialized ontology is constructed on the fly for each data set to represent its content explicitly and formally.

Zhe (Alan) Wu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001. He received his B.E. degree from the Special Class for Gifted Young, University of Science & Technology of China in 1996. He is currently a Principal Member of Technical Staff working in New England Development Center, Oracle. As an Oracle representative, he served on UDDI standard specification technical committee from Aug. 2003 to Sept. 2005. His work and research interests are in semantic web technologies, logical inferencing, database, web services, nonlinear optimization, computer security and computer networks.